This volume on computer graphies includes papers on: animation; rendering; curves and surfaces; triangulation; volume rendering; virtual reality; and scientific visualization.

This book presents the refereed proceedings of the EP'98 and RIDT'98 conferences, held jointly during the Second International Week on Electronic Publishing and Typography in St. Malo, France, in March/April 1998. The 43 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics covered are artistic imaging, tools and methods in typography, non-latin type, typographic creation, imaging, character recognition, handwriting models, legibility and design issues, fonts and design, time and multimedia, electronic and paper documents, document engineering, documents and linguistics, document reuse, hypertext and the Web, and hypertext creation and management.

Some of the best current research on realistic rendering is included in this volume. It emphasizes the current "hot topics” in this field: image based rendering, and efficient local and global-illumination calculations. In the first of these areas, there are several contributions on real-world model acquisition and display, on using image-based techniques for illumination and on efficient ways to parameterize and compress images or light fields, as well as on clever uses of texture and compositing hardware to achieve image warping and 3D surface textures. In global and local illumination, there are contributions on extending the techniques beyond diffuse reflections, to include specular and more general angle dependent reflection functions, on efficiently representing and approximating these reflection functions, on representing light sources and on approximating visibility and shadows. Finally, there are two contributions on how to use knowledge about human perception to concentrate the work of accurate rendering only where it will be noticed, and a survey of computer graphics techniques used in the production of a feature length computer-animated film with full 3D characters.

Min Chen, Arie E. Kaufman and Roni Yage/ Volume graphics is concerned with graphics scenes defined in volume data types, where a model is specified by a mass of points instead of a collection of surfaces. The underlying mathematical definition of such a model is a set of scalar fields, which define the geometrical and physical properties of every point in three dimensional space. As true 3D representations, volume data types possess more descriptive power than surface data types, and are morphologically closer to many high-level modelling schemes in traditional surface graphics such as parametric surfaces, implicit surfaces and volume sweeping. The past decade has witnessed significant advances in volume visualisation, driven mainly by applications such as medical imaging and scientific computation. The work in this field has produced a number of volume rendering methods that enable 3D information in a volumetric dataset to be selectively rendered into 2D images. With modern computer hardware, such a process can easily be performed on an ordinary workstation. More importantly, volume-based rendering offers a consistent solution to the primary deficiencies of the traditional surface-based rendering, which include its inability to encapsulate the internal description of a model, and the difficulties in rendering amorphous phenomena. The emergence of volume-based techniques has not only broadened the extent of graphics applications, but also brought computer graphics closer to other scientific and engineering disciplines, including image processing, computer vision, finite element analysis and rapid prototyping.

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, Third Edition, describes both the mathematical theory behind a modern photorealistic rendering system and its practical implementation. Through a method known as 'literate programming', the authors combine human-readable documentation and source code into a single reference that is specifically designed to aid comprehension. The result is a stunning achievement in graphics education. Through the ideas and software in this book, users will learn to design and employ a fully-featured rendering system for creating stunning imagery. This completely updated and revised edition includes new coverage on ray-tracing hair and curves primitives, numerical precision issues with ray tracing, LBVHs, realistic camera models, the measurement equation, and much more. It is a must-have, full color resource on physically-based rendering. - Presents up-to-date revisions of the seminal reference on rendering, including new sections on bidirectional path tracing, numerical robustness issues in ray tracing, realistic camera models, and subsurface scattering - Provides the source code for a complete rendering system allowing readers to get up and running fast - Includes a unique indexing feature, literate programming, that lists the locations of each function, variable, and method on the page where they are first described - Serves as an essential resource on physically-based rendering

Current research in Visual Database Systems can be characterized by scalability, multi-modality of interaction, and higher semantic levels of data. Visual interfaces that allow users to interact with large databases must scale to web and distributed applications. Interaction with databases must employ multiple and more diversified interaction modalities, such as speech and gesture, in addition to visual exploitation. Finally, the basic elements managed in modern databases are rapidly evolving, from text, images, sound, and video, to compositions and now annotations of these media, thus incorporating ever-higher levels and different facets of semantics. In addition to visual interfaces and multimedia databases, Visual and Multimedia Information Management includes research in the following areas: Speech and aural interfaces to databases; Visualization of web applications and database structure; Annotation and retrieval of image databases; Visual querying in geographical information systems; Video databases; and Virtual environment and modeling of complex shapes. Visual and Multimedia Information Management comprises the proceedings of the sixth International Conference on Visual Database Systems, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and held in Brisbane, Australia, in May 2002. This volume will be essential for researchers in the field of management of visual and multimedia information, as well as for industrial practitioners concerned with building IT products for managing visual and multimedia information.

Driven by consumer-market applications that enjoy steadily increasing economic importance, graphics hardware and rendering algorithms are a central focus of computer graphics research. Video-based rendering is an approach that aims to overcome the current bottleneck in the time-consuming modeling process and has applications in areas such as comput