key: cord-0044545-o5dxclmm
authors: Jorge, Joaquim
title: Editorial Note
date: 2020-03-31
journal: Comput Graph
DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2020.03.003
sha: edca36fa00633710cea2c5ee486fca4a1d211fd7
doc_id: 44545
cord_uid: o5dxclmm

nan

You are reading Computers and Graphics issue 87 out in press during the most troubled times. Indeed, the World Health Organization has declared a Covid-19 pandemic and many conferences are being cancelled due to contagion fears and subsequent travel and gathering restrictions. This will likely have very significant impact on the timely dissemination of scientific results especially in Interactive Computer Graphics and Visual Computing where International Conferences have long been the dissemination mechanism of choice. Indeed, the abrupt changes brought about by the pandemic will likely change the ways in which results are disseminated throughout the scientific communities. Our Journal will also be affected by these changes and we are working with many top venues to help in providing both quality control and speedy publication via Special and Technical Sections. This issue features papers from three special sections: 3DOR 2019 [1] , Expressive 2019 [2] [3] and Graphics Interface 2019 [4] . Please do browse the Foreword to the Special Sections on Expressive 2019 and Graphics Interface that are closed in this issue.

Our technical section contains a survey on visualization and five interesting papers on topics ranging from Shape Processing to Reconstruction. Reina et al [5] , present a survey on software development and its conflicting rewards to novel research. Visualization software is hard to design, use and maintain and this aftects prototypes and development of frameworks, which in turn affect future research presenting interesting problems to researchers and practitioners alike. The paper addresses relevant issues to the visualization community and contains the germs of an interesting and stimulating dialog. Thanks to cheap laser scanners and printers, digitized 3D shapes make up a large part of the modeling pipeline. However, digitized shapes are noisy and require considerable efforts to clean up. Schubert, Jalba and Telea [6] present a novel method able to denoise highly noisy 3D shapes while preserving sharp edges sharp using 3D surface skeletons in a computationally efficient manner. On a related topic, there is an ever-growing interest on digitizing human shapes for applications ranging from Avatar capture for Extended Reality to human modeling and clothing manufacturing systems. These require high precision digitization of human bodies. Ran et al [7] propose a passive high precision 3D acquisition system using 60 DSLR cameras, via a novel hierarchical seed-propagation stereo matching algorithm. Another manuscript on acquisition via scanning sensors by Matthew, Benes and Aliaga [8] provides a novel model suitable for robust acquisition of architectural spaces. Authors use an inverse modeling approach to determine swarming behavior model parameters and describe a practical design tool for predicting the suitability of a set of mobile sensors to scan a target environment.

Mobile video games are played on smartphones using advanced graphics cards. Battery limitations require more efficient graphics processors that can generate high-quality renderings without consuming much power. To this end, Rajan et al [9] designed and implemented a dual-precision fixed-point ray triangle intersection accelerator with low and high precision units, using a thresholding method to assess the criticality of a test and activate the highprecision unit when necessary. The authors report significant improvements both in power consumption and other design metrics to support low power quality rendering. Finally, a paper by Martin et al [10] proposes a method to simplify big graphs using spectral graph theory, in a way suitable for efficient drawing of large graphs at varying levels of detail. Their approach outperforms state-of-theart graph simplification methods while working with any graph drawing algorithm.

For several years, our Journal has looked into innovative ways to disseminate the original work and insights published in its pages through online media channels. Our LinkedIn group 1 now includes 2200 + students, researchers and professionals. Our Facebook page 2 already reaches 2100 + people in the community and growing at a fast clip. A twitter feed 3 is another outlet that is experiencing a significant increase in following. In addition to these, we manage an Instagram page 4 and a YouTube 5 channel to boost the visibility of quality work as it appears on ScienceDirect. Authors are welcome to submit their handles on social media to help us better disseminate their work. In the past few months our new publications have been seen by more than 50 0 0 0 people, with over 170 0 0 visualizations of companion videos. These initiatives are due in no small part to the work of Inês Santos, whose enthusiasm, consis-tency and dedication are key to establishing and maintaining our media presence.

While risks and uncertainties loom large in the first quarter of 2020, the changes likely to be brought about by the pandemic may eventually prove beneficial to the Community at large, by introducing novel and more efficient ways to disseminate scientific results and new findings. Thanks to its flexible, thorough and timely approach to refereeing and quality control, our Journal in uniquely positioned to contribute in a positive manner. I encourage you, the reader, to submit your finest research work to Computers & Graphics. As you can see from our initiatives and effort s, we strive to go beyond publishing merely incremental papers that extend the state-of-the-art in straightforward ways. Rather, we want to publish original research results providing clever and reproducible approaches to CG problems, that inspire other practitioners to devise novel methods, algorithms and techniques. We are looking forward to reading your latest and finest research outcomes, insights and contributions and will endeavor to give them our prompt and thorough consideration.

A sketch-aided retrieval approach for incomplete 3D objects

Adversarial Training for Fast Arbitrary Style Transfer

Arbitrary Style Transfer Using Neurally-Guided Patch-Based Synthesis

Shape refinement and rigging of raw-scanned 3D volume by a user-specified skeleton

The Moving Target of Visualization Software for an Increasingly Complex World

Feature preserving noise removal for binary voxel volumes using 3D surface skeletons

High-precision Human Body Acquisition via Multi-Binocular Stereopsis

An Output-Driven Approach to Design a Swarming Model for Architectural Indoor Environments

Dual-precision fixed-point arithmetic for low-power ray-triangle intersections

Spectrum-Preserving Sparsification for Visualization of Big Graphs