by Judy Brown and George Baciu
Delegates from eleven countries gathered at Yunnan University in the beautiful city of Kunming, China, August 22-24, for the seventh international conference on computer-aided design (CAD) and computer graphics, CAD/Graphics 2001. This conference, organized by the China Computer Federation is a biennially-held conference that aims to provide an international forum for presentation and discussion of the latest developments in fundamental research and practical applications in CAD and computer graphics. The conference also celebrated the 15th anniversary of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), an institution that promotes and finances basic research and some applied research in China. The excellent organizing work, especially the very hard work of local volunteers at Yunnan University, made the conference both efficient and exciting. The conference organizers felt that the local host, Yunnan University, gained broad relationships with foreign scholars due to organizing this International Conference, and that these relationships would greatly help the faculty and students in the College of Information Science and Technology of Yunnan University in their research and education.
The conference opened and closed with five invited keynote talks, and in between these plenary sessions, there were three parallel tracks that included papers on computational geometry, shape modeling, graphics and rendering algorithms, visualization and animation, human computer interface and multimedia, virtual reality and applications, electric CAD and system design, and CSCW and CAD/CAM techniques. Figure 1 shows George Baciu (third from right) and other conference attendees in front of the Yunnan University site of the conference.
Conference Co-Chairs Jiaoying Shi and John Staudhammer opened the conference with brief greetings from invited dignitaries from NSFC and Yunnan University, the conference host, followed by the first five plenary keynote talks. According to Professor Jiaoying Shi, the keynote talks were highly valued because the majority of the audience was made up of Chinese scholars and students who might not otherwise have an opportunity to hear these talks by both pioneers in computer graphics and young specialists who are in leading positions in the field today. Figure 2 shows Qunsheng Peng (Organizing Committee Chair), John Staudhammer, and Jiaoying Shi in a lovely courtyard at Yunnan University.
The first speaker, Jose Encarnacao (Fraunhofer Institute, Germany) discussed mixed reality and the virtual continuum which ranges from the real environment, through augmented reality and augmented virtuality, to the virtual environment. This was illustrated with images and videos from his research. Judy Brown, President of ACM SIGGRAPH, discussed how attendees could both benefit from and get involved with the activities of ACM SIGGRAPH, followed by a summary of highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2001 conference that had just occurred in Los Angeles. Shree Nayor (Columbia University, USA) discussed computational imaging and sampling the light field in unconventional ways to produce new forms of visual information. Wim Bronsvoort (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) discussed the main concepts in feature modelling, including semantic feature modelling, multiple-view feature-modelling, collaborative feature-modelling, and freeform feature modelling. Xiuzi Ye (SolidWorks Corporation, USA) completed the opening talks with a discussion of the issue of lofting and skinning in CAD and modeling.
There were a number of papers throughout the parallel tracks that dealt with pencil drawing, pen and ink illustrations, and painting. "Automatic Generation of Pencil Drawing from 2D Images Using Line Integral Convolution" by Xiaoyang Ma et al was inspired by the similarity between stroke textures of pencil drawings and the flow textures generated with line integral convolution. "A New Approach for Automatic Rendering of Pen-and-Ink Illustrations" by Weihua Zhou et al showed a process that begins with a reference image, generates a vector field with density controlled by the grayscales of the reference image, and uses this vector field to drive the pen and ink strokes.
On the second day of parallel sessions, George Baciu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) achieved an interesting feat of chairing a session on Visualization and Animation at the same time as he presented his paper on "An Efficient Method for Computing Plane Sections of Surfaces of Revolution" in a different parallel session on surface modeling and reconstruction. One of the animation papers was "Animating Water in Chinese Painting, by Jinhui Yu et al. This approach detects the position of water forms in a hand drawn Chinese painting and synthesizes these forms via a parametric signal processing technique. The water forms are then rendered with the look of a Chinese painting and animated in the hand drawn environment. "Animation Method for Pen-and-Ink Illustration Using Stroke Coherency" by Toshiyuki Haga et al demonstrated algorithms for creating both illustrations and animations in pen-and-ink style. "Computer-Assisted In-Between of Line Drawings: Image Matching" by Hock Soon Seah and Ji Lu presented an approach to automatically generate in-between line drawings based on feature mapping.
There were many other interesting and intriguing papers in the parallel sessions. The papers presented in the conference by authors from Chinese universities represent the latest research level in the field of CAD and computer graphics in China today. These authors are all from the major universities and research institutes in China. The range of topics covered this year was much wider than at the previous conferences, including topics such as virtual reality and shape modeling. This biennial international conference sponsored by the China Computer Federation is playing a major role for academic exchange between Chinese domestic scholars and world-wide scholars in the CAD and computer graphics field, therefore greatly promoting the research and education in the field in China and elsewhere. More information is available at [http://www.cad.zju.edu.cn//cadcg2001].
The conference closed with five invited keynote talks. Aaron Hertzmann (recent Ph.D. graduate from New York University) discussed "New Approaches to Rendering in Artistic Styles." One approach is to specify desires for the painting as an energy function and then minimize the energy. Another approach uses machine learning to create imagery that uses some aspects of the styles of famous artists. Eihachiro Nakanae discussed "Photo-Realistic Rendering for Landscape Environmental Assessment" by showing historical examples of lighting since 1983 as well as panoramic landscape compositing under different lighting conditions. Since "Once Upon a Foggy Night" is one of Judy's long-time favorite video pieces, she was pleased to have an opportunity to meet its creator. Stanislav Klimenko (Institute for High Energy Physics, Russia) presented "Visualization of Complex Physical Phenomena and Mathematical Objects in Virtual Environment." His case studies for science and education included the visual study of strings in topology and a virtual planetarium. John Staudhammer (University of California, Los Angeles) gave an interesting presentation on "Where are CAD and CG Headed?" This discussion covered trends in computer use such as loss of teaching personnel, lack of computer programmers, and growth of shared resources. Trends in CAD include the observation that Moore was/is/will be right, as computer resources continue to double every 18 months, that the silicon is the system, and that analog gets more challenging. Martin Reizer (German National Institute for Media Communication) closed the conference with his observations on "Computer Graphics in the Entertainment Industry." This was a very interesting observation of the progress in the entertainment field due to computer graphics, such as virtual characters in a real scene and real characters in virtual scenes. Some of the challenges include realistic skin, facial expression, and hair dynamics, and the integration of virtual and real. Games are the technology driver today, with a market of $6 Billion, compared to a market of $300 Million for visualization. However, the grand challenge is content production. Content, not technology, is key.
The mix of 191 interesting participants, beautiful scenery in Yunnan Province, and ample break time allowed for many opportunities to meet the other participants and discuss common goals. A virtual bowling alley, EasyBowling, was set up during break time. Easy Bowling has a real, physical bowling alley about six feet long and uses a real bowling ball, the speed and direction of which are tracked by a camera on the computer above the bowling lane. The computer then determines which of the virtual pins have been knocked down. EasyBowling is co-developed by the VR and Multimedia Division, State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, and PioneerSoft Graphics Company, which is lead by Dr. Zhigeng Pan. Figure 3shows Dr. Y.Y. Cai from Nanyang Polytechnic University, Dr. Tae-wan Kim from Sejong University, Korea, Professor Jiaoying Shi from Zhejiang University, Judy Brown from ACM SIGGRAPH, and Professor Zhigeng Pan, from Zhejiang University, getting set for a bowling match.
The conference organizers followed the SIGGRAPH conference model and organized a four-day Advanced Seminar before the paper presentation sessions. This was a domestic-oriented event, given in Chinese. The Seminar included four courses: Basics in Photo-realistic Computer Graphics, Advanced topics in Photorealistic Computer Graphics, Visualization in Scientific Visualization and Image-based Modeling and Rendering. The lecturers were all well known Chinese Scholars, and the seminar was very successful.
Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province in Southwest China, is aptly called the "Spring City" because of the spring-like weather and beautiful flowers year-round. Social events included wonderful Chinese cuisine throughout the conference, a special dinner, including local music and dance, hosted by the President of Yunnan University, a tour of the EXPO Gardens developed for the '99 International Horticultural Exposition, and a special banquet with a spectacular presentation of music and dance from many of the twenty-six nationalities that reside in Yunnan Province. Figure 4 shows Kwan-liu Ma and Aaron Hertzmann enjoying dinner at a Kunming lake-side restaurant with a student from Yunnan University who volunteered to help with the conference in order to practice her English. About a third of the attendees took part in a three-day post-conference tour to Lijiang and Dali, where we were able to see some historic sites and scenes of natural beauty and to learn more about the Naxi and Bai minorities. CAD/Graphics 2003 will be held in Macao.
