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Welcome


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Welcome to the Computer Graphics Group at RWTH Aachen University!

The research and teaching activities at our institute focus on geometry acquisition and processing, on interactive visualization, and on related areas such as computer vision, photo-realistic image synthesis, and ultra high speed multimedia data transmission.

In our projects we are cooperating with various industry companies as well as with academic research groups around the world. Results are published and presented at high-profile conferences and symposia. Additional funding sources, among others, are the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the European Union.

News

Our papers Quantised Global Autoencoder: A Holistic Approach to Representing Visual Data and Bijective Feature-Aware Contour Matching received best paper award and best presentation award respectively, at the 30th VMV 2025.

Oct. 7, 2025

We have a paper on improved visual data generation at ICCV 2025.

Oct. 6, 2025

We have a paper on retargeting visual data at ECCV 2024.

Aug. 5, 2024

We have a paper on freeform shape fabrication at Eurographics 2024.

April 26, 2024

We have a paper on greedily generating artwork using Bézier segments at VMV 2023.

May 23, 2023

Our paper on surface maps received the Günter Enderle Best Paper Award at Eurographics 2023.

May 12, 2023

Recent Publications

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Multidimensional Byte Pair Encoding: Shortened Sequences for Improved Visual Data Generation

International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2025

In language processing, transformers benefit greatly from text being condensed. This is achieved through a larger vocabulary that captures word fragments instead of plain characters. This is often done with Byte Pair Encoding. In the context of images, tokenisation of visual data is usually limited to regular grids obtained from quantisation methods, without global content awareness. Our work improves tokenisation of visual data by bringing Byte Pair Encoding from 1D to multiple dimensions, as a complementary add-on to existing compression. We achieve this through counting constellations of token pairs and replacing the most frequent token pair with a newly introduced token. The multidimensionality only increases the computation time by a factor of 2 for images, making it applicable even to large datasets like ImageNet within minutes on consumer hardware. This is a lossless preprocessing step. Our evaluation shows improved training and inference performance of transformers on visual data achieved by compressing frequent constellations of tokens: The resulting sequences are shorter, with more uniformly distributed information content, e.g. condensing empty regions in an image into single tokens. As our experiments show, these condensed sequences are easier to process. We additionally introduce a strategy to amplify this compression further by clustering the vocabulary.

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Exact and Efficient Mesh-Kernel Generation

Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2025

The mesh kernel for a star-shaped mesh is a convex polyhedron given by the intersection of all half-spaces defined by the faces of the input mesh. For all non-star-shaped meshes, the kernel is empty. We present a method to robustly and efficiently compute the kernel of an input triangle mesh by using exact plane-based integer arithmetic to compute the mesh kernel. We make use of several ways to accelerate the computation time. Since many applications just require information if a non-empty mesh kernel exists, we also propose a method to efficiently determine whether a kernel exists by developing an exact plane-based linear program solver. We evaluate our method on a large dataset of triangle meshes and show that in contrast to previous methods, our approach is exact and robust while maintaining a high performance. It is on average two orders of magnitude faster than other exact state-of-the-art methods and often about one order of magnitude faster than non-exact methods.

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Minimalism or Creative Chaos? On the Arrangement and Analysis of Numerous Scatterplots in Immersi-ve 3D Knowledge Spaces

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 2025

Working with scatterplots is a classic everyday task for data analysts, which gets increasingly complex the more plots are required to form an understanding of the underlying data. To help analysts retrieve relevant plots more quickly when they are needed, immersive virtual environments (iVEs) provide them with the option to freely arrange scatterplots in the 3D space around them. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different virtual environments on the users' ability to quickly find and retrieve individual scatterplots from a larger collection. We tested three different scenarios, all having in common that users were able to position the plots freely in space according to their own needs, but each providing them with varying numbers of landmarks serving as visual cues - an Emptycene as a baseline condition, a single landmark condition with one prominent visual cue being a Desk, and a multiple landmarks condition being a virtual Office. Results from a between-subject investigation with 45 participants indicate that the time and effort users invest in arranging their plots within an iVE had a greater impact on memory performance than the design of the iVE itself. We report on the individual arrangement strategies that participants used to solve the task effectively and underline the importance of an active arrangement phase for supporting the spatial memorization of scatterplots in iVEs.

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