Selena Ling, Abhishek Madan, Nicholas Sharp, Alec Jacobson
{"title":"Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays","authors":"Selena Ling, Abhishek Madan, Nicholas Sharp, Alec Jacobson","doi":"10.1111/cgf.70202","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Randomly sampling points on surfaces is an essential operation in geometry processing. This sampling is computationally straightforward on explicit meshes, but it is much more difficult on other shape representations, such as widely-used implicit surfaces. This work studies a simple and general scheme for sampling points on a surface, which is derived from a connection to the intersections of random rays with the surface. Concretely, given a subroutine to cast a ray against a surface and find all intersections, we can use that subroutine to uniformly sample white noise points on the surface. This approach is particularly effective in the context of implicit signed distance functions, where sphere marching allows us to efficiently cast rays and sample points, without needing to extract an intermediate mesh. We analyze the basic method to show that it guarantees uniformity, and find experimentally that it is significantly more efficient than alternative strategies on a variety of representations. Furthermore, we show extensions to blue noise sampling and stratified sampling, and applications to deform neural implicit surfaces as well as moment estimation.</p>","PeriodicalId":10687,"journal":{"name":"Computer Graphics Forum","volume":"44 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cgf.70202","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Computer Graphics Forum","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cgf.70202","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Randomly sampling points on surfaces is an essential operation in geometry processing. This sampling is computationally straightforward on explicit meshes, but it is much more difficult on other shape representations, such as widely-used implicit surfaces. This work studies a simple and general scheme for sampling points on a surface, which is derived from a connection to the intersections of random rays with the surface. Concretely, given a subroutine to cast a ray against a surface and find all intersections, we can use that subroutine to uniformly sample white noise points on the surface. This approach is particularly effective in the context of implicit signed distance functions, where sphere marching allows us to efficiently cast rays and sample points, without needing to extract an intermediate mesh. We analyze the basic method to show that it guarantees uniformity, and find experimentally that it is significantly more efficient than alternative strategies on a variety of representations. Furthermore, we show extensions to blue noise sampling and stratified sampling, and applications to deform neural implicit surfaces as well as moment estimation.
期刊介绍:
Computer Graphics Forum is the official journal of Eurographics, published in cooperation with Wiley-Blackwell, and is a unique, international source of information for computer graphics professionals interested in graphics developments worldwide. It is now one of the leading journals for researchers, developers and users of computer graphics in both commercial and academic environments. The journal reports on the latest developments in the field throughout the world and covers all aspects of the theory, practice and application of computer graphics.