Research

Topic-wise, one of my recurring interests is on the analysis and synthesis of repetitive phenomena such as textures, samples, noises, structures, motions, and interactions. These can involve various fields including computer graphics, parallel computing, and human computer interaction. In fact, since computer science is about repetitive computations, I have excuses to work on whatever I like. ☺

Methodology-wise, I am mainly interested in developing fundamental algorithms that span diverse phenomena driven by practical applications. I like to observe prevailing issues in the human side of computation (e.g. graphics and HCI), and figure out the underlying problems and core solutions.

Note: due to obvious reasons I cannot release the code for almost all projects I did with Microsoft. If the code is available, I will put it online here. I am afraid I do not have time to answer every email regarding source codes.

U: Interaction
P: Parallelism
S: Sampling
T: Texturing
R: Rendering
A: Animation
G: Geometry
I: Imaging
O: Other

AT Dynamic Element Textures
Chongyang Ma, Li-Yi Wei, Sylvain Lefebvre, Xin Tong
SIGGRAPH 2013
[paper][supplementary material][video (xvid)][video (mp4)][video (youtube)][code]
In discrete element textures we modeled spaghetti. Here we animate them.

S Point Sampling with General Noise Spectrum
Yahan Zhou, Haibin Huang, Li-Yi Wei, Rui Wang
SIGGRAPH 2012
[paper][supplementary material][code]
Yes, I like to make a lot of noises.

O Design of 2D Time-Varying Vector Fields
Guoning Chen, Vivek Kwatra, Li-Yi Wei, Charles Hansen, Eugene Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Volume 18, Number 10 (October 2012)

UI Nonlinear Revision Control for Images
Hsiang-Ting Chen, Li-Yi Wei, Chun-Fa Chang
SIGGRAPH 2011
[paper][video (youtube)]
This project started as deformable BTF synthesis and eventually became image revision control after "a few twists and turns".

TG Discrete Element Textures
Chongyang Ma, Li-Yi Wei, Xin Tong
SIGGRAPH 2011
[paper][video (divx)][video (youtube)][talk]
One of Jim Blinn's 10 unsolved prolems in computer graphics: modeling, rendering, and animation of "spaghetti".

S Differential Domain Analysis for Non-uniform Sampling
Li-Yi Wei, Rui Wang
SIGGRAPH 2011
[paper][talk][code]
(Yeah! I can do math!) This project all started with a simple trigonometric transformation.

Computing Natural Repetitions
Li-Yi Wei
Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2010-109
[paper]
This is my research statement written around 2010.

RP Nonlinear Beam Tracing on a GPU
Baoquan Liu, Li-Yi Wei, Xu Yang, Chongyang Ma, Ying-Qing Xu, Baining Guo, Enhua Wu
Computer Graphics Forum, Volume 30, Number 8 (December 2011)
[techreport][video (youtube)][code (MS only)]

PSGTR Parallel Poisson Disk Sampling with Spectrum Analysis on Surfaces
John Bowers, Rui Wang, Li-Yi Wei, David Maletz
SIGGRAPH Asia 2010
[paper][supplement][video (youtube)][video (avi)][exe demo][spectrum analysis code]
The sampling part is an extension of my SIGGRAPH 2008 paper, but the analysis part is novel in the use of spectral mesh basis instead of Fourier basis to compute spectrums. (And yes, I like to make a lot of noises.)

SIGT Anisotropic Blue Noise Sampling
Hongwei Li, Li-Yi Wei, Pedro V. Sander, Chi-Wing Fu
SIGGRAPH Asia 2010
[paper][paper + supplementary materials]
This project started with fast dart throwing on surfaces, but eventually we decided to perform sampling on the parametric domain, leading to the whole notion of anisotropic sampling. (And yes, I like to make a lot of noises.)

S Multi-class Blue Noise Sampling
Li-Yi Wei
SIGGRAPH 2010
[paper][paper + supplementary materials][talk][code][blog (with code) by Jose Esteve]
This is an extension of single class blue noise sampling to multiple classes. (And yes, I like to make a lot of noises.)

SR Detail-Preserving Paint Modeling for 3D Brushes
Nelson Chu, William Baxter, Li-Yi Wei, Naga Govindaraju
SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering 2010
[paper][video (youtube)]
An interesting application of sampling to digital painting.

S Fast Capacity Constrained Voronoi Tessellation
Hongwei Li, Diego Nehab, Li-Yi Wei, Pedro V. Sander, Chi-Wing Fu
SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2010 Posters
[paper]

AT Motion Field Texture Synthesis
Chongyang Ma, Li-Yi Wei, Baining Guo, Kun Zhou
SIGGRAPH Asia 2009
[paper][video (youtube)]
This is my first animation paper. I never thought I am going to have a paper related to fluids, but since Chongyang (with a background in physics) told me that is where his passion is, I tried to come up with an idea that could combine his interest and my expertise. (Attempting to accommodate students' wishes seems to be a good way to force me learn new things.) For this project I picked up fluids from scratch, and I have benefited tremendously from the course notes by Müller-Fischer and Bridson.

T State of the Art in Example-based Texture Synthesis
Li-Yi Wei, Sylvain Lefebvre, Vivek Kwatra, Greg Turk
EUROGRAPHICS 2009 STAR
[paper][slides (part 1, by Li-Yi)][slides (part 2, by Sylvain)]
Hopefully this could reduce your trouble for citing a lot of texture synthesis papers.

PSRT Parallel Poisson Disk Sampling
Li-Yi Wei
SIGGRAPH 2008
[paper][video (youtube)][video (zip)][talk][code (MS only)][exe (siga10)]
I wrote the paper from a sampling point of view, but at my presentation I motivated the problem as a new potential methodology for parallelizing algorithms. You might want to check out my talk slides as this new information is not in the official paper. Note: if you can't access the MS-only code, you can use the public domain exe from my SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 paper on surface sampling and treat the planar domain here as a special case.

TR Inverse Texture Synthesis
Li-Yi Wei, Jianwei Han, Kun Zhou, Hujun Bao, Baining Guo, Heung-Yeung Shum
SIGGRAPH 2008
[paper][video (youtube)][video (avi)][talk][code (MS only)]
You might also want to check out a related paper in CVPR 2008: "Summarizing Visual Data Using Bidirectional Similarity".

PSRT Parallel White Noise Generation on a GPU via Cryptographic Hash
Stanley Tzeng, Li-Yi Wei
SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2008
[paper][video (youtube)][video (avi)][talk][code (Cg, MS only)][code (CUDA, public)]
This is a technique that generates uniform random numbers in a totally parallel and random-accessible fashion. The basic idea is very simple: given an input that can be trivially produced in parallel (e.g. a linear ramp), use cryptographic hash to scramble the individual samples independently and in parallel, and the output set will exhibit white noise statistics. I came up this idea around year 2004 (while studying cryptography as a hobby), but couldn't really implemented the thing until commodity GPUs support integer shader arithmetic.

ITU High Dynamic Range Image Hallucination
Lvdi Wang, Li-Yi Wei, Kun Zhou, Baining Guo, Heung-Yeung Shum
EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering 2007
[paper][video (youtube)][video (avi)][talk][code (MS only)]
A certain attendee during a certain SIGGRAPH conference commented to me that "he really had enough for all these HDR and texture synthesis papers". This paper is a combination of these two.

RPI Rendering from Compressed High Dynamic Range Textures on Programmable Graphics Hardware
Lvdi Wang, Xi Wang, Peter-Pike Sloan, Li-Yi Wei, Xin Tong, Baining Guo
SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2007
[paper]
This paper presents a compressed high dynamic range texture format implemented on DX9 level graphics hardware.

T Context-Aware Textures
Jianye Lu, Athinodoros S. Georghiades, Andreas Glaser, Hongzhi Wu, Li-Yi Wei, Baining Guo, Julie Dorsey, Holly Rushmeier
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 26, Issue 1 (January 2007)
This is a collaboration between Yale and MSRA. This is how we divided our job: Yale people did all the hard work (capturing, analysis, and paper writing) and MSRA people did all the fun work (texture synthesis and rendering). I liked this deal a lot and I am looking forward for future collaborations.

AO Visualizing Flow Fields by Perceptual Motion
Li-Yi Wei
Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-82 June 2006
[paper]
Some little experiments showing that a static picture can produce animation sensations. Human perception is treacherous. You might also want to check out a related paper in SIGGRAPH 2008: "Self-Animating Images: Illusory Motion Using Repeated Asymmetric Patterns".

RP Multi-Layer Depth Peeling via Fragment Sort
Baoquan Liu, Li-Yi Wei, Ying-Qing Xu
Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-81 June 2006 (later published in CAD/Graphics '09)
[paper]
I know reading and writing the same frame-buffer-object within the same rendering pass is hazardous, but I couldn't avoid my desire to abuse it. So I presented this little naughty trick to peel 8 layers of fragments per rendering pass. The k-buffer paper continued this abuse, and also started some interesting ideas on programmable ROP (which I believe will become reality in near generation GPUs).

T Fast Example-based Surface Texture Synthesis via Discrete Optimization
Jianwei Han, Kun Zhou, Li-Yi Wei, Minmin Gong, Hujun Bao, Xinming Zhang, Baining Guo
The Visual Computer (Pacific Graphics 2006)
[paper][video (youtube)][video (avi)][talk][code (MS only)]
The key result of this paper is animated texture flows on arbitrary surfaces. This cannot be adequately shown by static images (or even animated gifs), so it is best to take a look at our video. Our key algorithm is a discrete solver, combining texture optimization with k-coherence. I believe this achieves the best quality/performance tradeoff among existing techniques. Furthermore, it is amenable for GPU implementation.

RP Silhouette Texture
Hongzhi Wu, Li-Yi Wei, Xi Wang, Baining Guo
EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering 2006
[paper][video (youtube)][video (mov)][talk]
This paper is totally Hongzhi's idea, and I just help him polish and write the paper. Hongzhi was only an undergrad while working on this paper.

RP Real-time Multi-perspective Rendering on Graphics Hardware
Xianyou Hou, Li-Yi Wei, Heung-Yeung Shum, Baining Guo
EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Rendering 2006
[paper][video (youtube)][video (mov)][talk]
I started to believe that polygon rasterization can be used to render secondary rays as well. See my "Nonlinear Beam Tracing" paper for the second foray.

G Subspace Gradient Domain Mesh Deformation
Jin Huang, Xiaohan Shi, Xinguo Liu, Kun Zhou, Li-Yi Wei, Shang-Hua Teng, Hujun Bao, Baining Guo, Heung-Yeung Shum
SIGGRAPH 2006
[paper][video (youtube)][video (wmv)]
This is my first non-first-authored paper. I learned mesh/geometry processing from scratch during this project; it is a very rewarding experience. In addition, Shanghua informed me that (thanks to him) my Erdös number is now at most 3.

RPT Tile-based Texture Mapping
Li-Yi Wei
In GPU Gems II 2005
They offered me free book copies, so I thought it is worth the little work of porting my Graphics Hardware 2004 paper into a book chapter.

RPT Tile-based Texture Mapping on Graphics Hardware
Li-Yi Wei
SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Conference on Graphics Hardware 2004
My only paper with NVIDIA. I did it primarily to escape from the routines of my GPU architecture day job. The unofficial record is that I am the first NVIDIAN who ever published a paper totally unrelated to the main job functions.

T Texture Synthesis from Multiple Sources
Li-Yi Wei
SIGGRAPH 2003 Sketches and Applications
This sketch applies multi-source texture synthesis to two main applications: texture mixtures and solid texture synthesis from 2D views. The former has been extended in [Zhang et al. 2003] and [Matusik et al. 2005], and the latter by [Kopf et al. 2007].

TP Order-Independent Texture Synthesis
Li-Yi Wei, Marc Levoy
Submitted to SIGGRAPH 2003
I really like this idea, but couldn't convince SIGGRAPH about its value. Fortunately, Sylvain Lefebvre and Hughes Hoppe later made it practical on a GPU. See their paper here.

TP Order-Independent Texture Synthesis
Li-Yi Wei, Marc Levoy
Stanford Computer Science Department Technical Report 2002-01

T Texture Synthesis by Fixed Neighborhood Searching
Li-Yi Wei
Stanford University Ph.D. Dissertation, December 2001
My thesis actually got cited. (You must have heard of the joke about inserting a \$20 bill into one's dissertation in the library and found out it is still there 20 years later, right?)

T Texture Synthesis over Arbitrary Manifold Surfaces
Li-Yi Wei, Marc Levoy
SIGGRAPH 2001
This paper continued my (in)famous career in computer graphics.

T Fast Texture Synthesis using Tree-structured Vector Quantization
Li-Yi Wei, Marc Levoy
SIGGRAPH 2000
This paper started my (in)famous career in computer graphics.

T Deterministic Texture Analysis and Synthesis Using Tree Structure Vector Quantization
Li-Yi Wei
XII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing, 1999
This is my first publication. Even though much less well known than my SIGGRAPH 2000 paper it serves an important historical evidence, proving that my TSVQ algorithm was derived from [Popat and Picard 1993], not [Efros and Leung 1999] (which is a great paper; don't get me wrong).