The Interactive Graphics Systems Group is focusing on a wide range of research topics in the field of Computer Graphics, such as the Geometric Search and Semantic Modeling for Digital Libraries applications, Visual Inference and Digitisation in Computer Graphics, Medical Image Processing and Visual Search and Analysis.
In addition, the department both offers introductory courses, such as “Computer Graphics I and II”, “Visual Computing”, as well as higher lectures. In these lectures basic knowledge in rendering with OpenGL, 3D data acquisition, illumination models, modeling of curves and surfaces, volumetric data, meshes and many other subjects is imparted.
One of the research focus points is the geometric modeling of objects, dealing with the reconstruction of measured data from nature and the processing of surfaces, e.g. with CAD applications. Reconstruction artifacts include both surfaces of the scanned object as well as volume data from medicine. The generation of appropriate discretisation and high-quality visualisations are of central importance.
When geometry is obtained by a procedural step of generating a parameterized description of an object, we speak of semantic modeling of 2- or 3- dimensional data. For example, the wheels of a car tire will be described with parameters for diameter, width and number of spokes. This allows complex scenes, and modeling operations can be constructed from simple functional units.
Due to the increasing number and relevance of non-textual documents, new challenges appear in archiving these data in digital libraries. The central problem in this area is a consistent storage in the sense of generalized document formats, organising and analysing data, and the search in such libraries, for example, by similarity search (query-by-example).
In Visual Analytics, the main problem is the information visualization of large and complex data sets for analysis purposes. Such multi-dimensional data are found in many industrial applications, such as in finance and process monitoring, and can be presented according to the use case, with different paradigms (or metaphors).