Numerical Anamorphosis: an Artistic Exploration

Francesco de Comite (1, 2) , Laurent Grisoni (3)

1 CRIStAL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille - UMR 9189
2 Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies
3 MINT2 - Méthodes et outils pour l'Interaction à gestes

Anamorphoses have been know for centuries, as distorted images needing to be seen in a mirror from a special point of view in order to see the non-distorted image. During Renaissance, they have been associated to mathematical techniques for drawing such pictures efficiently, on specific mirror shapes (in the case of cylindrical or conical mirrors). We can expect in the next years a strong interest in such type of images, because of the emergence of various contexts and physical supports for image visualization (soft or de-formable screens, lightmapping, projection of images on dynamic objects, etc...). Solving the numerical problem of anamorphosis in the general case belongs to the same class of problems as when the trend is to control image deformation as long as image is seen projected on, or reflected by, a non-planar surface, which can be of arbitrary shape. In this work, we show how raycasting technique, well-known in the computer graphics community , can be used to provide an efficient general framework for such rendering. We describe an effective procedure for building general anamorphoses. A generalization of the method leads to the conception of three-dimensional anamorphic sculptures, usable for 3D printing anamorphic objects. We exhibit , through several artworks, tangible and virtual examples.

Mots clés: anamorphosis; geometry

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Géométrie algorithmique [cs.CG]

Francesco de Comite, Laurent Grisoni. Numerical Anamorphosis: an Artistic Exploration. SIGGRAPH ASIA 2015, Nov 2015, Kobe, Japan. ⟨hal-01258727⟩