This is very out of date! This 2006 reading list is for historical reference only. Do not use it to prepare for the graphics qual today!

Computer Graphics Qualifying Examination Reading List

Interim Version:
This state of the Graphics Qualifying Exam is in Flux as the graphics course structure at the graduate level evolves.
This list contains little that wasn't on the previous list, and deletes a whole bunch.

At present, the bibliography is not complete. There are many papers referred to within the reading list that are not yet listed. Also, there are a few topics for which explicit references are not yet named.

Text in light-blue italics (like this) are expected FUTURE changes. These things will not be on the qualifying exam until (at least) the next update of this reading list. We include these notes as a warning as to what may arrise in the future.

Basic Topics

Students are expected to have mastery of the topics covered in an introductory graphics class. More detail can be found by looking at the syllabus from recent offerings of CS559.

A good introductory text should be sufficient to cover this material. At present, we use the text "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, 2nd edition" by Shirley et. al. (referred to as [FCG]). A few topics are not covered well in the text, so we recommend additional readings. The text "Real-Time Rendering" by Moller and Haines [Moller&Haines] has excellent treatments of many introductory topics.

The readings here should be considered a minimum example of how to gain familiarity with the topic. The particular chapters/papers are not required.

Basic Visual Perception Applied (as applied to Graphics)

[FCG] Chapter 21

Image Storage and Raster Algorithms

[FCG] Chapter 3. [future: add readings about image compression]

Color

[FCG] Chapter 20. (future: the text is weak on alternate color models)

Signal and Image Processing

[FCG] Chapter 4 (future: the text is weak on "practical" image processing).
Gomez and Velho's [Gomez and Velho] Image Processing book is a good reference geared towards graphics students, but is overkill for qual prepation.

Transformations and Viewing

[FCG] Chapters 6 & 7, or [Moller&Haines] Chapter 3. Note: Quaternions are extremely important, but not covered in FCG (they are covered in Moller&Haines). In general, students should understand the major techniques for representing rotations and their tradeoffs. Two good references are: the classic introduction by Shoemake [Shoemake:1985:ARW], or Grassia's discussion of exponential maps [Grassia98].

Visibility

[FCG] Chapter 8 - covers the basics, more advanced visibility (such as for large models) is discussed below.

Curves

[FCG] Chapter 15

Surfaces

Not covered in the text. See the "Advanced" topic below.

Shading and Simple Lighting

[FCG] Chapter 9

Texture Mapping (and its variants)

[FCG] Chapter 11 is (barely) adequate, [Moller&Haines] Chapter 5 is an excellent reference.
Filtering issues and their implementation (Mipmaps, Ripmaps, Summed area tables) are all discussed in Moller and Haines.

Compositing

Not covered in the text. The best reference is probably The original paper by Porter and Duff [Porter:1984:CDI] is one good source.

Advanced Topics

Image-Based Techniques

Image-Based Rendering

• [McMillan:1995:PMA] Plenoptic Modeling. (a more rigorous variant of Quicktime VR [Chen:1995:QVI] - which is still interesting because of its commercial success).
• [Levoy:1996:LFR] Light Field Rendering (or [Gortler:1996:TL] The Lumigraph - which is a very similar technique).
• [Debevec:1996:MAR] Modeling and Rendering Architecture from Photographs.
• Future: add some image-based lighting paper

Image Warping

This is an important enough topic to warrant its own heading. The Wolberg survey article is highly recommended (and possibly sufficient for control issues). Students should understand the Bier-Neeley method, and why it is important. Low level image sampling issues are essential to understand. Wolberg's book is a good reference for the basic image processing issues.

• [Beier:1992:FIM] This paper (and the method it introduces) is important because it is the first highly successful warping technique. What differentiates it from what came before is that it is designed to be useful by artists.
• [Wolberg:1998:IMA] A good survey of the field, with a focus on George's own work (which is important, so its warranted).

Tone Mapping

Students should understand the issues involved, and have some intuitions for how some of the major techniques work. [FCG] Chapter 22 is a good (and sufficient) introduction.

Texture Synthesis

Students should be familiar with the major methods for texture synthesis.

• Texture Quilting: [Efros:2001:IQT] - you should be familiar with the ideas behind the things that came before it, in particular Efros & Leung's 1999 point-based method.
• Recommended, but not required: Graphcut Textures, Kwarta et all SIGGRAPH 2003.

Modeling and Shape Representation

Students should have a familiarity with the major methods for representing shape (surfaces and solids) in Computer Graphics. Familiarity with polygon models, parametric surfaces (bezier patches, B-Splines, NURBS), subdivision surfaces, point set representations, constructive solid geometry and implicit surfaces is important. Students should have the basic concepts of each, and understand the tradeoffs to know where each is appropriate.
[future: provide some good overviews]

Some specific topics that students should be familiar with:

Subdivision Surfaces

Students should be familiar with the basic methods, and the arguments for and against the use of Subdivision Surfaces in computer graphics.

• [Stam:1998:EEO] Stam's Evaluation of Catmull Clark (important for understand how subdivision works).
• [DeRose:1998:SSI] Practical issues (and motivation)

Meshes (and Mesh Signal Processing)

The basic concepts of using meshes are discussed in many of introductory readings. Their use to represent smooth surfaces can be seen in Subdivision Surfaces (above). Understanding mesh smoothing is important to bridge the gap. Students should be familiar with Taubin's basic method, and the improvements introduced by Desbrun et. al

• BMSB:1999:IFAM - Desbrun et. all present a nice explanation of the basics and grab bag of extensions.
• Taubin:2000:GSPM - Taubin's survey article is a re-hash of his seminal 1995 Paper, with a little bit of historical perspective.

Free Form Deformations:

See the original (and seminal) paper [Sederberg:1986:FDO] Free Form Deformations.

Point-Based Representations:

The SIGGRAPH 2004 course notes "Point-Based Computer Graphics" (organized by Markus Gross with a who's who of contributors) is the best resource. The lecture slides give good indications of the motivations and issues. Students should be familiar with these motivations for Point-based represenations, the issues in using Point-based representations, and the basic methods for working with them. Students should have some idea of how surface and implicit fields are defined by points.
The original papers are also recommended:

• [Rusinkiewicz:2000:QMP] (QSplat) - an important point-based rendering system
• The Digital Michaelangelo Project - important for motivating the use of points.

• [Sederberg:1986:FDO] Free Form Deformations.
• [DeRose:1998:SSI] Practical issues (and motivation) for using subdivision surfaces in filmmaking.
• [Guskov:1999:MSP] Multi-Resolution Signal Processing for Meshes. (important for insights into what multi-resolution means with meshes).
  Future: replace with some other multi-resolution paper, like normal meshes instead?

Simplification

Recommended, but not required: The survey by Cohen et al is good at introducing the key issues and basic concepts.

Specific, require papers / methods to know about:

• Quadric Error Simplification. An important and significant technique used widely in practice. [Garland:2005:QSD] is a newer reference than the original 1997 SIGGRAPH paper. It has the advantage of giving some perspective on the technique.
• [Hoppe:1996:PM] Progressive Meshes: The first technique for continuous level of detail.

Rendering

Rendering topics are covered in CS779. Students are expected to have knowledge of rendering issues beyond what is discussed in an introductory text.

Photo-realistic Rendering

Future: The Physically-Based Rendering textbook should replace most/all of these out of date papers.

The basic concepts of realistic rendering are best described in the text Physically Based Rendering : From Theory to Implementation by Matt Pharr.

• Radiometry - the definition and measurement of physical quantities.
• The Radiosity equation and its solution.
• Ray tracing methods for non-diffuse illumination ([FCG] Chapter 10).
• [Kajiya:1986:TRE] Kajiya's formulation of the rendering equation and its interpretation as multiple bounces of light rays.
• [Cook:1984:DRT] Distributed Ray Tracing.
• [Heckbert:1990:ART] Caching radiance on surfaces, and the introduction of the regular expression description of light paths.
• Photon map techniques[Jensen:1995:PMI] (give a more current reference )

Stylized Rendering

[Moller&Haines] Chapter 7 discusses a variety of the basic styles, and should be a first starting point (especially for things like silhouettes and toon shading). Impressionist or painting-based styles are included for historical significance.

• [Gooch:1998:ANL] Technical Illustration.
• [Haeberli:1990:PBN] Paint by Numbers - really the first NPR paper.
• [Litwinowicz:1997:PIA] Impressionist Effects recommended because it discusses many of the issues in doing stylized rendering.
• Suggestive Contours, DeCarlo et al. SIGGRAPH 2003.
• Image Abstraction (DeCarlo and Santenella, SIGGRAPH 2002)

Future: texts cover basic concepts and methods well - we should pick one. Some discussion of stroke-based methods and silhouette finding is probably useful.

Visibility

Basic visibility methods (Z-buffer, BSP trees) are discussed as basic topics. This set of papers should be reconsidered.

• [Teller:1991:VPF] Potentially visible sets.
• [Funkhouser:1992:MOL] Managing Large Amounts of Data in Interactive Building Walkthroughs.
• [Luebke:1995:PAM] Portals and Mirrors.

Graphics Hardware

Students should have an idea of how modern graphics hardware works, in particular, how programmability of the pipeline is used. [FCG] Chapter 17 is a decent reference.

Future: add some survey of "real-time rendering" (how to use graphics hardware to achieve special effects).

Animation

Basic Animation Principles and Concepts

[FCG] Chapter 16 provides a quick overview of the basic concepts and issues.

• [Lasseter:1987:POT] Traditional principles of animation - what makes for good animation. This paper is required because it is so seminal. Most people in graphics learn from this paper.

Simulation Techniques

• [Witkin:2001:PBM] Witkin and Baraff SIGGRAPH Course Notes - introduce issues with ODE solving and constraints. Students should understand the basics of particle simulations, and the issues in rigid body simulations and collisions (although the specific methods for handling collisions are not important).
• [Reynolds:1987:FHA] Flocking - a basic, and well-known procedural model.
• [Baraff:1998:LSI] Fast steps in cloth simulation, or a lesson in why implicit integration is good for stiff systens. More recent papers provide more effective methods. "Stable but responsive cloth" by Choi and Ko (SIGGRAPH 2002) is recommended.
• Future: add a Fluids paper. Stable Fluids by Jos Stam, SIGGRAPH 1998, and recommend Visual Simulation of Smoke by Foster et al, SIGGRAPH 2001.
• Future: add a Fast modal methods such as one by Doug James.

Motion Capture and Editing

• The basics of representation are important - they are generally covered in the basic readings on transformations. Students should understand the tradeoffs in rotation representation.
• [Maciejewski:1990:DWT] Basic issues in forward and inverse kinematics.
  Future: add a more modern IK paper
• [Mohr:2003:SBE] Skinning by example techniques - less for the skinning by example, but more for its discussion of basic skinning techniques and their good and bad points. Basic skinning is also covered in [Moller&Haines] Chapter 3.
• Issues in working with Motion Capture data (including processing). [Gleicher:1998:RMT] Retargeting is recommended for discussing the issues, but the specific methods are not important.
  Future: add a reference for general motion capture issues.
• Signal processing methods for motion capture (such as filtering and blending). Future: add a general reading. For now, the signal processing intuitions can be found in the retargeting paper [Gleicher:1998:RMT], and the methods of Registration Curves [Kovar:2003:RC] are required for the qual.
• Motion Graphs are valuable as a specific example of a motion capture technique that points to many of the issues in working with motion data. The specific paper required is "Motion Graphs" by Kovar et. al (SIGGRAPH 2002) [Kovar:2002:MG], but other similar methods are fine (they just don't have as good a discussion of the general motion capture issues).

Seminal Systems

Students should have enough of a sense of the history of the field, and be aware of some key systems and why they are significant. While the exact details of these systems are not important, an appreciation for why they were important is. (this list is greatly reduced)

• [Sutherland:1963:SAM] Sketchpad.
• [Cook:1987:TRI] Renderman and Reyes Renderers.
• [Chen:1995:QVI] Quicktime VR
• [Zeleznik96] Sketch

Books Referenced

Recommended Texts:

[FCG] Peter Shirley with others. Foundations of Computer Graphics (2nd edition). AK Peters, 2005.

[Moller&Haines] T. Moller and E. Hanes. Real-time Rendering (2nd edition). AK Peters. 2002.

Other Texts:

Gomez and Velho. "Image Processing for Computer Graphics." Springer Verlag, 1997

A nice textbook. A bit gratuitously mathematical, but much more readable and relevant than the typical engineering text. The whole book is a bit overkill for preparing for the qual

Required Papers

(note this list is incomplete - all of the required citations above are required).

[DMSB:1999:IFAM]M. Desbrun, M. Meyer, P. Schr�Á�der, and A. Barr. Implicit fairing of arbitrary meshes using diffusion and curvature flow. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1999, pp. 317�–324, 1999.

[DeRose:1998:SSI] Tony DeRose and Michael Kass and Tien Truong. Subdivision Surfaces in Character Animation, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 98, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 85-94 (July 1998, Orlando, Florida). Addison Wesley. Edited by Michael Cohen. ISBN 0-89791-999-8.

[Efros:2001:IQT] Efros, A. A. and Freeman, W. T. 2001. Image quilting for texture synthesis and transfer. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and interactive Techniques SIGGRAPH '01.

[Garland:2005:QSD] Garland, M. and Zhou, Y. 2005. Quadric-based simplification in any dimension. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 2 (Apr. 2005), 209-239.

[Guskov:1999:MSP] Igor Guskov and Wim Sweldens and Peter Schr�Á�der. Multiresolution Signal Processing for Meshes, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 99, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 325-334 (August 1999, Los Angeles, California). Addison Wesley Longman. Edited by Alyn Rockwood. ISBN 0-20148-560-5.

[Hoppe:1996:PM] Hugues Hoppe. Progressive Meshes, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 96, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 99-108 (August 1996, New Orleans, Louisiana).

[Rusinkiewicz:2000:QMP] Rusinkiewicz, S. and Levoy, M. 2000. QSplat: a multiresolution point rendering system for large meshes. Proceedings SIGGRAPH 2000.

[Sederberg:1986:FDO] Thomas W. Sederberg and Scott R. Parry. Free-Form Deformation of Solid Geometric Models, Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 86), 20 (4), pp. 151-160 (August 1986, Dallas, Texas).

[Stam:1998:EEO] Jos Stam. Exact Evaluation of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces at Arbitrary Parameter Values, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 98, Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual Conference Series, pp. 395-404 (July 1998, Orlando, Florida).

[Taubin:2000:GSPM]. Taubin. Geometric signal processing on polygonal meshes. Eurographics 2000 State of the Art Report, August 2000. [PDF]

Other Papers Referenced (recommended)

[Grassia98] F. Sebastian Grassia. Practical Parameterization of Rotations Using the Exponential Map, Journal of Graphics Tools, 3(3), pp. 29-48 (1998). ISSN 1086-7651.

[Porter:1984:CDI] T. Porter, T. Duff, "Compositing Digital Images," Computer Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 18:3, pp. 253-259, 1984.

[Shoemake:1985:ARW] Ken Shoemake. Animating Rotation with Quaternion Curves, Computer Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 85), 19 (3), pp. 245-254 (July 1985, San Francisco, California). Edited by B. A. Barsky. (warning: the original paper had some errors - try to find the corrected one!)

G. Taubin. A signal processing approach to fair surface design. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1995. [PDF]