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Procedural modeling of rivers from single image toward natural scene production

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Abstract

The rapid and flexible design of natural environments is an important yet challenging task in graphics simulation, virtual reality, and video game productions. This is particularly difficult for natural river modeling due to its complex topology, geometric diversity, and its natural interaction with the complicated terrain. In this paper, we introduce an integrated method for example-based procedural modeling to overcome such difficulties. First, we propose a compact parametric model to represent the certain river, which inherits typical features of natural rivers such as tributary, distributary, tortuosity, possible lakes adjacent to the river. Then, we demonstrate our method for generating 3D river scene solely based on the parametric model. However, choosing appropriate parameters is a tedious undertaking in practice. To further enhance our method’s functionality, we rely upon a natural river image to extract meaningful parameters toward the rapid procedural production of the new river scene. Finally, we design a new method to compare two river scenes and iteratively optimize the river network by using the simulated annealing technique. Our method can produce natural river scenes from an example river network and single terrain image with little interaction, and the synthesized scene is visually consistent with the input example in terms of feature similarity. We also demonstrate that our procedural modeling approach is highly automatic toward rapid scene production through various graphics examples.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is partially supported by Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61532002, 61672237), Natural Science Foundation Grant NSF IIS-1715985, and National High-tech R&D Program of China (863 Program) under Grant 2015AA016404.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, East China Normal University, Putuo District, Shanghai, China

    Jian Zhang, Chang-bo Wang, Yi Chen & Yan Gao

  2. Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-4400, USA

    Hong Qin

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  1. Jian Zhang
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  2. Chang-bo Wang
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  3. Hong Qin
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  4. Yi Chen
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  5. Yan Gao
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Correspondence to Chang-bo Wang.

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Zhang, J., Wang, Cb., Qin, H. et al. Procedural modeling of rivers from single image toward natural scene production. Vis Comput 35, 223–237 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-017-1465-7

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