Open topics will be listed on the webpage. Please register in the initial meeting or through email (mindek#cg.tuwien.ac.at).

Online material

Written reports will be uploaded here (after the semester).

PowerPoint slides of the initial meeting.

Written reports from the winter semester

Some written reports from the summer semester 2012 are available. These can be used as a reference to structure your own paper.

General Information about the seminar

Goal of the seminar

The goal of this seminar is to conduct a sound literature review on a specific topic and present a state of the art report. A member of the teaching staff will guide and help students in acquiring the scientific material and structuring the report. A written report in the form of a scientific paper will be produced. The students are also expected to present their work in a 20 minutes talk during the semester. Topics for the seminar will be available in the initial meeting. Students have the option to work in groups of two.

Tasks for the students

Students are expected to fulfil certain requirements of the seminar. Teaching staff will evaluate and grade students based on the following output.
  • A list of literature, that a student intends to review is to be submitted within the first 14 days of the start of the seminar. Students are not expected to provide a comprehensive list. This document will be regarded as an official seminar registration of the student.
  • A written report in the form of a scientific paper. We strongly encourage that the reports are composed in LaTeX. The report must have a minimum of 8 written pages per student. Depending on the student and the supervisor, the prefered language is either German or English, with English as a preference.
  • It is mandatory to attend the lecture "Forschung und wie sie funktioniert" of Professor Eduard Gröller, the lecture "Wie halte ich einen Vortrag" of Professor Werner Purgathofer, and the lecture "Wie schreibt man eine wissenschaftliche Arbeit?" of Professor Michael Wimmer. You can ask for a waiver in case you have already attended one of these talks.
  • A 20 minutes presentation in English language followed by a 5 minutes discussion. A template for the PowerPoint presentation is provided in the Link's section. The slides are to be submitted to the teaching staff after the talk.
  • Active discussion participation is expected after the presentation of other students.

Plagiarism

All the literature that is reviewed during the seminar has to be placed in the reference section of the report. You can have further information about referencing here. We are all expected to abide by professional scientific ethics and make sure that the work is not plagiarized in any sense.

Important Dates

Grading Criteria

  • Written Report is worth 50% of the grade
  • Talk is worth 40% of the grade
  • Attendance during the talks is worth 5% of the grade
  • Active discussion participation is worth 5% of the grade

Submitting the report after deadline is penalized by deduction of 10% from the grading. Additionally, every started day after deadline when the report has not yet been submitted is penalized by deduction of another 10% (missing the deadline means deduction of at least 20%).

Topics

  • Uncertainty Visualization: Two slots available
    Every measurement has some degree of uncertainty or error associated with it. In many cases it is small and can be neglected. However, recently uncertainty is of high interest in many areas. Uncertainty visualization is a challenging task, as it takes additional data dimension to be shown to the user. Many visualization techniques depicting uncertainty of the underlying data have been developed: showing uncertainties with volume rendering, using noise or textures, utilizing animations, or using point point-based surface representations.
  • Parameter Visualization: Two slots available
    Controlling algorithms behavior is done using many parameters. E.g., in engineering various simulations provide their outputs based on some physical parameters. Finding optimal parameters or exploring the sensitivity of the algorithm with respect to its parameters are important and elaborate tasks. The visual exploration is especially challenging as it often have to represent multi-dimensional data in the form that can be mentally perceived by humans. In this context parameter exploration systems are used. These systems are utilizing such techniques as parallel coordinates, scatter plots and set of 2D parameter space projections.
  • Volume Editing: Two slots available
    Volume Editing is challenging task with a lot of applications. Just consider the process of modeling of real-world objects. Without proper tools any detail should be drawn by people. Other field is volume segmentation. Some time ago doctors were using simple voxel brushing in order to obtain desired organ’s mask. Nowadays a lot of techniques are proposed for Volume Editing, making life easier. Probably you’ve heard about Smart Scissors and Live Wire in 2D. Edited masks of objects create perfect basis for volume annotation, which can be even more attractive than simple anatomical book
  • Pre-integration in Volume Rendering: Two slots available
    Obtaining nice pictures without artifacts is beneficial for any Volume Rendering algorithm. But actually there is plenty of source of artifacts, those make life too sad, like transfer function with high frequencies, shading and gradients. The most challenging are silhouettes, those provide both neat interesting pictures and lot’s of ringing artifacts. The pre-integration technique was designed to fight them all. How it reaches its objective is your task to discover.
  • Focus+Context in Graph Visualization: No slots available
    Data with tree- and graph-like structure are very common nowadays. For analysis of this kind of data it is crucial to be able to visualize it in a way that reveals areas of interest. For bigger graphs, the screen is usually not large enough for displaying the whole structure whilst conveying all information. Focus+Context techniques are used to show only the important parts of the graph, but preserving the less important parts as a context. This way, more information can be communicated by the visualization algorithm using less space.
  • Procedural Content Generation: Two slots available
    In the process of producing video games or movies it is sometimes necessary to create visual representations of objects which would be too laborious to be created manually by artists. This is when the procedural content generation comes into play. Procedural content generation is a set of techniques for creating large amount of various visual content, such as 3D models or textures, from small number of input parameters. It can be used to generate sceneries or even whole worlds for games and movies.
  • Glyph-based Visualization: Two slots available
    Glyphs are used to visualize certain information such as the orientation of flow, pressure or temperature. There exist several types of different glyphs like arrows, ellipsoids or superquadrics. Each of them has its specific degrees of freedom or properties, onto which parameters, such as pressure or flow-orientation, can be mapped. Some glyphs might convey this information well in 2d and others might be more suitable for 3D. Additionally, some glyph properties might be perceive differently, which leads to the field of perception (pre-attentive stimuli vs. attentive stimuli).
  • Vessel Visualization: One slot available
    The visualization of vessels is a very important task. There exist several approaches that have different features and therefore are used in various application areas. Whereas one technique is can be solely used, there are possibilities to combine different one in order to utilize their advantages. An example would be the VesselGlyph, where a diagnostic vessel visualization, namely Curved Planar Reformation, is embedded into Direct Volume Rendering. Among various techniques, some require a segmentation of vessels, whereas others use the knowledge that vessels usually exhibit a tubular structure.
  • Sports Visualisation: Two slots available
    Sports meetings are not only entertaining, but usually also produce a huge amount of data. For coaches, sportmen as well as for viewers, sports visualisation techniques can help to get a better insight into this data. At the one hand, several statistical parameters are collected during a sports meeting, e.g. all given passes during a soccer game. Sports visualisation techniques can help to further analyse this data. On the other hand, several actions and events are recorded during a sports meeting. Here real-time visualisation techniques can help to create an overview of the current situation, and assisted coaches in their decision making.
  • Large-Scale Network Visualisation: Two slots available
    In graph drawing methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization are used to derive two- or three-dimensional depictions of graphs. A drawing of a graph usually represents its corresponding edges and nodes. The analysis of large-scale graphs or networks is an interesting task in visualisation. Due to the large number of edges, nodes and additional parameters, it is a challenging task to choose the right visualisation technique. The resulting drawings should convey most of the information, but should also not lead to a cluttered appearance. The need to visualize large-scale networks arises from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, and bioinformatics.
  • From the Smallest to the Biggest: Two slots available
    The visualization of the natural phenomena with scientific methods enables to experience the world that is otherwise limited to the human visual system. With the most advanced microscopes and telescopes we are able to experience the world around us that would be hidden to us otherwise. If we look at the world at different scales, organized by size and distance, we could build a scale. The goal of the project is to write a survey about visualizations that are made at those scale sorted from the smallest scale of picometer (scale of diameter of a gold atom) to the scale of objects in the universe (distance to Quasar). The survey should contain description of methods currently used in science (capturing, visual mapping, rendering) which should be accompanied with compelling images.
  • Realistic Skin Rendering: Two slots available
    Reallistic skin rendering has an application in various areas, such as movie industry or computer games. Various rendering techniques have to be combined in order to generate realistically looking skin. Many real-time techniques for advanced skin rendering, such as screen space subsurface scattering, have been developed as well.

Downloads

Paper Search Engines

Tips for Writing Papers and Preparing Presentations