Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives

By Hanspeter Pfister, Matthias Zwicker, Jeroen van Baar, Markus H. Gross. International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 2000

1,122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surface elements (surfels) are a powerful paradigm to efficiently render complex geometric objects at interactive frame rates. Unlike classical surface discretizations, i.e., triangles or quadrilateral meshes, surfels are point primitives without explicit connectivity. Surfel attributes comprise depth, texture color, normal, and others. As a pre-process, an octree-based surfel representation of a geometric object is computed. During sampling, surfel positions and normals are optionally perturbed, and different levels of texture colors are prefiltered and stored per surfel. During rendering, a hierarchical forward warping algorithm projects surfels to a z-buffer. A novel method called visibility splatting determines visible surfels and holes in the z-buffer. Visible surfels are shaded using texture filtering, Phong illumination, and environment mapping using per-surfel normals. Several methods of image reconstruction, including supersampling, offer flexible speed-quality tradeoffs. Due to the simplicity of the operations, the surfel rendering pipeline is amenable for hardware implementation. Surfel objects offer complex shape, low rendering cost and high image quality, which makes them specifically suited for low-cost, real-time graphics, such as games.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbef1d7e4e504d25ee9785d47d7e2c00ba2a7014

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Citations in the corpus

Point set surfaces (2001, methodology): “Another reason is that highly detailed surfaces require a large number of small primitives, which contribute to less than a pixel when displayed, so that points become an effective display primitive [33, 36].”
Computing and Rendering Point Set Surfaces (2003, methodology): “The Surfels technique of Pfister et al. [41] builds and improves on this earlier work.”
Surface splatting (2001, unknown): “This is similar to the visibility splatting approach of [15].”
Pix2Shape: Towards Unsupervised Learning of 3D Scenes from Images Using a View-Based Representation (2020, background): “, surfels (Pfister et al. 2000), square-shaped planes”
LiDARsim: Realistic LiDAR Simulation by Leveraging the Real World (2020, methodology): “We use surfels due to their simple construction, effective occlusion reasoning, and efﬁcient collision checking[28].”
Real-Time 3D Reconstruction in Dynamic Scenes Using Point-Based Fusion (2013, background): “[22] took this one step further, demonstrating higher quality scanning of small objects using a higher resolution custom structured light camera, sensor drift correction, and higher quality surfel-based [15] rendering.”
RGB-D Mapping: Using Depth Cameras for Dense 3D Modeling of Indoor Environments (2010, methodology): “As more point clouds are added to the surfel representation, we follow rules similar to those of [22] and [17] for updating, adding, and removing surfels.”
Pointshop 3D: an interactive system for point-based surface editing (2002, methodology): “By generalizing 2D image pixels towards 3D surface pixels (surfels [Szeliski and Tonnesen 1992, Pfister et al. 2000]) we combine the functionality of 3D geometry based sculpting with the simplicity and effectiveness of 2D image based photo editing.”
A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting (2024, unknown): “The innovation of 3D GS lies in its unique blend of the benefits of differentiable pipelines and point-based rendering techniques [197, 210, 297, 349].”
Manipulator and object tracking for in-hand 3D object modeling (2011, unknown): “Surfels, originally used as a rendering primitive (Pfister et al., 2000), are oriented discs representing local surface patches on an object.”
Neural Point-Based Graphics (2019, methodology): “Using points as the modeling primitives for rendering (point-based graphics) was proposed in [9,10] and have been in active development in the 2000s [18,19,11,12].”
2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields (2024, methodology): “Ontheother hand, earlier works [Pfister et al. 2000; Zwicker et al. 2001a] have shown surfels (surface elements) to be an effective representation for complex geometry.”