Jonathan Bronson

 

Advances in biomedical imaging and simulation have led to the need for robust multimaterial tetrahedral meshing algorithms. This work focuses on achieving gauranteed solutions for a class of multimaterial volume datasets. We develop a methodology for ensuring that material interfaces are captured accurately (conformed to) and that element quality never deteriorates beyond a limit. We provide proof sketches and example datasets to illustrate these features. This method utilizes octrees to support didatic grading of elements in regions of homogeneity.

Jonathan Bronson, Joshua Levine, Ross Whitaker
"Lattice Cleaving: Conforming Tetrahedral Meshes of Multimaterial Domains with Bounded Quality"
Proceedings of 21st International Meshing Roundtable (San Jose, CA, Oct 7 - 10, 2012), pp. 191-209. [PDF][Springer]

 

In this work, we take a first step in evaluating the suitability of the MapReduce framework to implement large-scale visualization techniques. Specifically, we implement and evaluate a representative suite of visualization tasks (mesh rendering, isosurface extraction, and mesh simplification) as MapReduce programs, and report quantitative performance results applying these algorithms to realistic datasets. For example, we perform isosurface extraction of up to l6 isovalues for volumes composed of 27 billion voxels, simplification of meshes with 30GBs of data and subsequent rendering with image resolutions up to 80000² pixels. Our results indicate that the parallel scalability, ease of use, ease of access to computing resources, and fault-tolerance of MapReduce offer a promising foundation for a combined data manipulation and data visualization system deployed in a public cloud or a local commodity cluster.

Huy T. Vo, Jonathan Bronson, Brian Summa, Joao L.D. Comba, Juliana Freire, Bill Howe, Valerio Pascucci, Claudio T. Silva
"Parallel Visualization on Large Clusters using MapReduce"
IEEE Symposium on Large-scale Data Analysis and Visualization (LDAV), 2011. [PDF]

 

We present a particle-based approach for generating adaptive triangular surface and tetrahedral volume meshes from CAD models. Our approach uses a hierarchical sampling scheme that places particles on features in order of increasing dimensionality. These particles reach a good distribution by minimizing an energy computed in 3D world space, with movements occurring in the parametric space of each surface patch. Rather than using a pre-computed measure of feature size, our system automatically adapts to both curvature as well as a notion of topological separation. It also enforces a measure of smoothness on these constraints to construct a sizing field that acts as a proxy to piecewise-smooth feature size. We evaluate our technique with comparisons against other popular triangular meshing techniques for this domain.

Jonathan Bronson, Joshua Levine, Ross Whitaker
"Particle Systems for Adaptive, Isotropic Meshing of CAD Models"
Proceedings of the 19th International Meshing Roundtable (Chattanooga, TN, October 3 - 6, 2010). [PDF]
Awarded Best Technical Paper

   

Developed as an interactive program, the stencil utilities toolkit allows the user to turn an arbitrary 3D mesh into a guideline for a printed stencil. Users can adjust line thickness, lighting, and camera angles to achieve the desired result. Hardware Acceleration is used to obtain the artistic style and a unique algorithm joins disconnected regions. These generated stencils can be used to fabricate hand usable stencils or sent to factory for Gobo production for use in theatrical stage lighting.

Jonathan Bronson, Penny Rheingans, Marc Olano
"Semi-Automatic Stencil Creation Through Error Minimization"
NPAR '08: Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering. [PDF]
Awarded Best M.S. Research, UMBC CSEE Department Research Review, 2007