Pinchmaps: Textures with Customizable Discontinuities

We introduce a new texture representation that combines standard bi-linearly interpolated samples, for smoothly varying regions, with customizable discontinuities for sharp boundaries between these regions. It consists in a standard signal texture, plus a second texture we call pinchmap, which encodes discontinuities along generally curved lines; this structure is stored in texture memory as a pair of images and is effciently interpreted on commodity graphic hardware in the fragment shader. We also present a fully automatic way to compute a pinchmap and signal texture pair from an much higher resolution image. We show that the final effect on the screen is a comparable visual quality, for a fraction of the texture storage cost and a very small impact on performance.

@Article\{TC05,
  author       = "Tarini, Marco and Cignoni, Paolo",
  title        = "Pinchmaps: Textures with Customizable Discontinuities",
  journal      = "Computer Graphics Forum",
  number       = "3",
  volume       = "24",
  pages        = "557--568",
  year         = "2005",
  note         = "(Eurographics 2005 Conf. Proc.)",
  url          = "http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2005/TC05"
}