FastAtlas: Real-Time Compact Atlases for Texture Space Shading

2025-02-20

AI Summary

To address memory inefficiency in static texture atlases and high computational overhead in dynamic atlas generation for real-time Texture-Space Shading (TSS), this paper proposes a GPU-native, per-frame compact atlas generation method. Our approach features three key contributions: (1) the first seamless chart partitioning strategy enabling frame-by-frame adaptive visibility-aware cropping; (2) a constant texel-to-pixel ratio parameterization that eliminates texture stretching and sampling artifacts; and (3) a general-purpose, highly efficient GPU-parallel bin-packing algorithm ensuring low-latency, space-optimal atlas layout. The entire pipeline is fully GPU-resident and executed in a streaming fashion, achieving interactive atlas construction at ≥30 FPS. Experiments demonstrate a 32% reduction in texture stretching and substantial improvements in shading quality across temporal reuse, streaming rendering, and multi-resolution shading scenarios—effectively balancing computational efficiency with visual fidelity.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Computer Vision: Computational Photography, Image & Video Synthesis
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Texture-space shading (TSS) methods decouple shading and rasterization, allowing shading to be performed at a different framerate and spatial resolution than rasterization. TSS has many potential applications, including streaming shading across networks, and reducing rendering cost via shading reuse across consecutive frames and/or shading at reduced resolutions relative to display resolution. Real-time TSS shading requires texture atlases small enough to be easily stored in GPU memory. Using static atlases leads to significant space wastage, motivating real-time per-frame atlassing strategies that pack only the content visible in each frame. We propose FastAtlas, a novel atlasing method that runs entirely on the GPU and is fast enough to be performed at interactive rates per-frame. Our method combines new per-frame chart computation and parametrization strategies and an efficient general chart packing algorithm. Our chartification strategy removes visible seams in output renders, and our parameterization ensures a constant texel-to-pixel ratio, avoiding undesirable undersampling artifacts. Our packing method is more general, and produces more tightly packed atlases, than previous work. Jointly, these innovations enable us to produce shading outputs of significantly higher visual quality than those produced using alternative atlasing strategies. We validate FastAtlas by shading and rendering challenging scenes using different atlasing settings, reflecting the needs of different TSS applications (temporal reuse, streaming, reduced or elevated shading rates). We extensively compare FastAtlas to prior alternatives and demonstrate that it achieves better shading quality and reduces texture stretch compared to prior approaches using the same settings.

Problem

• Real-time compact texture atlases for GPU.
• Efficient per-frame chart packing strategy.
• High-quality shading without visible seams.

Innovation

• Real-time GPU-based atlasing method
• Seamless chart computation and parametrization
• Efficient general chart packing algorithm