title: Isocube: exploiting the cubemap hardware.
abstract: This paper proposes a novel six-face spherical map, isocube, that fully utilizes the cubemap hardware built in most GPUs. Unlike the cubemap, the proposed isocube uniformly samples the unit sphere (uniformly distributed), and all samples span the same solid angle (equally important). Its mapping computation contains only a small overhead. By feeding the cubemap hardware with the six-face isocube map, the isocube can exploit all built-in texturing operators tailored for the cubemap and achieve a very high frame rate. In addition, we develop an anisotropic filtering that compensates aliasing artifacts due to texture magnification. This filtering technique extends the existing hardware anisotropic filtering and can be applied not only to the proposed isocube, but also to other texture mapping applications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. lwan@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wan
authors.forename: Tien-Tsin
authors.initials: TT
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Chi-Sing
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Leung
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D004867:Equipment Design; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted