I went to Surfaces just to hear LR: Compact Connectivity Representation for Triangle Meshes. Their technique is pretty simple, and achieves really good results. Their primary insight was that a lot of mesh connectivvity can be stored implicitly by the ordering of the verticies. If all of your vertex data is a (non-indexed) strip, you get a lot of information for free. Like most mesh data structures, they only handle manifold meshes. The big disadvantage is that LR doesn't "yet" handle updates, but that's an area of planned future research.

I also tried to get over to the last bits of Mixed Grill, but I only managed to catch High-Resolution Relightable Buildings From Photographs. Their technique is really a novel combination of several known techniques. Their results are pretty impressive.

The last session before lunch was Image Processing. I was primarily interested in Antialiasing Recovery, and it was a really well given talk. You can tell that a speaker knows their audience when he starts with, "I understand that there are people like me that like to take naps during talks, so if you want to get the gist of the paper, pay attention to these parts." Strong work.

They take an image before and after some filter operation (e.g., thresholding to black and white) and try to recover antialiasing (smooth edges, really) in the prefiltered image. This is acomplished by examining both images for hard edges and doing neighbor searches and blending in the areas where new hard edges appear. On current limitation is the assumption that only two colors from a pixel's 8 neighbors contribute to the original smooth edge. They also plan to have code available on their project page in a month or so.

Local Laplacian Filters: Edge-aware Image Processing with a Laplacian Pyramid was a clever techniqe. I'll probably try to play around with it a bit. There are a few areas in real-time rendering (e.g., SSAO, some soft-shadow algorithms) where bilateral filtering is used as an edge-aware filter. Most of these are low-frequency effects where some of the noise isn't as apparent, but there may still be some benefit.

The remaining papers, Domain Transform for Edge-Aware Image and Video Processing and Non-Rigid Dense Correspondence With Applications for Image Enhancement, produce really good results, but they're both in area way outside my area of expertise.

I spent the afternoon in the expo hall and at the Animation Theater "demoscene" session. Hurray for seeing CNCD / Fairlight on the big screen. Things have come a long way since my scene days...

After that, I went to the OpenGL BoF. Hurray for OpenGL 4.2!