HLSL tex2d sampler seemingly using inconsistent rounding; why? - rounding

I have code that needs to render regions of my object differently depending on their location. I am trying to use a colour map to define these regions.
The problem is when I sample from my colour map, I get collisions. Ie, two regions with different colours in the colourmap get the same value returned from the sampler.
I've tried various formats of my colour map. I set the colours for each region to be "5" apart in each case;
Indexed colour
RGB, RGBA: region 1 will have RGB 5%,5%,5%. region 2 will have RGB 10%,10%,10% and so on.
HSV Greyscale: region 1 will have HSV 0,0,5%. region 2 will have HSV 0,0,10% and so on.
(Values selected in The Gimp)
The tex2D sampler returns a value [0..1].
[ I then intend to derive an int array index from region. Code to do with that is unrelated, so has been removed from the question ]
float region = tex2D(gColourmapSampler,In.UV).x;
Sampling the "5%" colour gave a "region" of 0.05098 in hlsl.
From this I assume the 5% represents 5/100*255, or 12.75, which is rounded to 13 when stored in the texture. (Reasoning: 0.05098 * 255 ~= 13)
By this logic, the 50% should be stored as 127.5.
Sampled, I get 0.50196 which implies it was stored as 128.
the 70% should be stored as 178.5.
Sampled, I get 0.698039, which implies it was stored as 178.
What rounding is going on here?
(127.5 becomes 128, 178.5 becomes 178 ?!)
Edit: OK,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankers_rounding#Round_half_to_even
Apparently this is "banker's rounding". I have no idea why this is being used, but it solves my problem. Apparently, it's a Gimp issue.
I am using Shader Model 2 and FX Composer. This is my sampler declaration;
//Colour map
texture gColourmapTexture <
string ResourceName = "Globe_Colourmap_Regions_Greyscale.png";
string ResourceType = "2D";
>;
sampler2D gColourmapSampler : register(s1) = sampler_state {
Texture = <gColourmapTexture>;
#if DIRECT3D_VERSION >= 0xa00
Filter = MIN_MAG_MIP_LINEAR;
#else /* DIRECT3D_VERSION < 0xa00 */
MinFilter = Linear;
MipFilter = Linear;
MagFilter = Linear;
#endif /* DIRECT3D_VERSION */
AddressU = Clamp;
AddressV = Clamp;
};

I never used HLSL, but I did use GLSL a while back (and I must admit it's terribly far in my head).
One issue I had with textures is that 0 is not the first pixel. 1 is not the second one. 0 is the edge of the texture and 1 is the right edge of the first pixel. The values get interpolated automatically and that can cause serious trouble if what you need is precision like when applying a lookup table rather than applying a normal texture. You need to aim for the middle of the pixel, so asking for [0.5,0.5], [1.5,0.5] rather than [0,0], [1, 0] and so on.
At least, that's the way it was in GLSL.

Beware: region in levels[region] is rounded down. When you see 5 % in your image editor, the actual value in the texture 8b representation is 5/100*255 = 12.75, which may be either 12 or 13. If it is 12, the rounding down will hit you. If you want rounding to nearest, you need to change this to levels[region+0.5].
Another similar thing (already written by Louis-Philippe) which might hit you is texture coordinates rounding rules. You always need to hit a spot in the texel so that you are not in between of two texels, otherwise the result is ill-defined (you may get any of two randomly) and some of your source texels may disapper while other duplicate. Those rules are different for bilinar and point sampling, you may need to add half of texel size when sampling to compensate for this.

GIMP uses banker's rounding. Apparently.
This threw out my code to derive region indicies.

Related

Homogeneous coordinates and perspective-correctness?

Does the technique that vulkan uses (and I assume other graphics libraries too) to interpolate vertex attributes in a perspective-correct manner require that the vertex shader must normalize the homogenous camera-space vertex position (ie: divide through by the w-coordinate such that the w-coordinate is 1.0) prior to multiplication by a typical projection matrix of the form...
g/s 0 0 0
0 g 0 n
0 0 f/(f-n) -nf/(f-n)
0 0 1 0
...in order for perspective-correctness to work properly?
Or, will perspective-correctness continue to work on any homogeneous vertex position in camera-space (with a w-coordinate other than 1.0)?
(I didn't completely follow the perspective-correctness math, so it is unclear which to me which is the case.)
Update:
In order to clarify terminology:
vec4 modelCoordinates = vec4(x_in, y_in, z_in, 1);
mat4 modelToWorld = ...;
vec4 worldCoordinates = modelToWorld * modelCoordinates;
mat4 worldToCamera = ...;
vec4 cameraCoordinates = worldToCamera * worldCoordinates;
mat4 cameraToProjection = ...;
vec4 clipCoordinates = cameraToProjection * cameraCoordinates;
output(clipCoordinates);
cameraToProjection is a matrix like the one shown in the question
The question is does cameraCoordinates.w have to be 1.0?
And consequently the last row of both the modelToWorld and worldToCamera matricies have to be 0 0 0 1?
You have this exactly backwards. Doing the perspective divide in the shader is what prevents perspective-correct interpolation. The rasterizer needs the perspective information provided by the W component to do its job. With a W of 1, the interpolation is done in window space, without any regard to perspective.
Provide a clip-space coordinate to the output of your vertex processing stage, and let the system do what it exists to do.
the vertex shader must normalize the homogenous camera-space vertex position (ie: divide through by the w-coordinate such that the w-coordinate is 1.0) prior to multiplication by a typical projection matrix of the form...
If your camera-space vertex position does not have a W of 1.0, then one of two things has happened:
You are deliberately operating in a post-projection world space or some similar construct. This is a perfectly valid thing to do, and the math for a camera space can be perfectly reasonable.
Your code is broken somewhere. That is, you intend for your world and camera space to be a normal, Euclidean, non-homogeneous space, but somehow the math didn't work out. Obviously, this is not a perfectly valid thing to do.
In both cases, dividing by W is the wrong thing to do. If your world space that you're placing a camera into is post-projection (such as in this example), dividing by W will break your perspective-correct interpolation, as outlined above. If your code is broken, dividing by W will merely mask the actual problem; better to fix your code than to hide the bug, as it may crop up elsewhere.
To see whether or not the camera coordinates need to be in normal form, let's represent the camera coordinates as multiples of w, so they are (wx,wy,wz,w).
Multiplying through by the given projection matrix, we get the clip coordinates (wxg/s, wyg, fwz/(f-n)-nfw/(f-n)), wz)
Calculating the x-y framebuffer coordinates as per the fixed Vulkan formula we get (P_x * xg/sz +O_x, P_y * Hgy/z + O_y). Notice this does not depend on w, so the position in the framebuffer of a polygons verticies doesn't require the camera coordinates be in normal form.
Likewise calculation of the barycentric coordinates of fragments within a polygon only depends on x,y in framebuffer coordinates, and so is also independant of w.
However perspective-correct perspective interpolation of fragment attributes does depend on W_clip of the verticies as this is used in the formula given in the Vulkan spec. As shown above W_clip is wz which does depend on w and scales with it, so we can conclude that camera coordinates must be in normal form (their w must be 1.0)

Web Assembly drawing gray canvas

I'm using Go and compiling it to web assembly.
I'm trying to render a bunch of rectangles next to eachother with a random colour, but they keep rendering as just gray.
My render function looks something like this:
for row,_ := range rows {
for col,_ := range row {
ctx.Set("fillStyle", fmt.Sprintf("#%06x", rand.Int()))
ctx.Call("fillRect", 20, 20 + (col * width), maxHeight - (row*height))
}
}
With which it renders a big block (all rectangles are next to eachother) but just all in gray, instead of doing them in different colours.
Is this enough code in the example to help further? If not I can post it to a gist, as I'm new to WASM I'm unsure which parts could really be relevant - but those 2 functions are the only ones doing something with rendering as far as I can tell.
The problem is that you use this expression to construct the fill style:
fmt.Sprintf("#%06x", rand.Int())
rand.Int() returns a non-negative pseudo-random int. Size of int is 64 bits if GOOS=js and GOARCH=wasm. What this means is that the random int number will be random 8 bytes (first bit being always 0 due to being non-negative).
If you format such a number with the %06x verb, like almost all the time it will be more than just 6 hex digits. The width 6 means to be at least 6, and the flag 0 means to pad with zeros if less. But if it's longer, it is not truncated.
And if you set an invalid color to canvas.fillStyle, it will disregard it and the last set valid fill style will remain active. And I'm guessing it was a gray color you used before the loop.
Fix is easy, just make sure the random number has no more than 3 bytes, or in other words, 6 hex digits. Use a simple bitmask:
ctx.Set("fillStyle", fmt.Sprintf("#%06x", rand.Int()&0xffffff))
Or use rand.Intn() instead of rand.Int():
ctx.Set("fillStyle", fmt.Sprintf("#%06x", rand.Int(0x1000000)))
Also context.fillRect() expects 4 arguments: x, y, width and height, so it should be something like this:
ctx.Call("fillRect", 20+(col*width), maxHeight-(row*height), width, height)

Same come different Pixels in Processing

I am working in Processing and I would like to compare the color of 2 the pixels of 2 different images.
let's say we comparing the pixel in position 10
color c1= image1.pixels[10]; color c2= image2.pixels[10];
if(c1==c2) { //so something }
Firstly I was playing with brightnsess
if(brightness(c1)==brightness(c2))
Generally it was working but not exactly as I wanted as the pixels were a little bit similar but not exactly the same color.
if you want to compare colours you are probably better off comparing the three basic ones instead of the actual number that "color" is. Thus instead of
if(c1 == c2)
where you compare two large numbers like 13314249 you can go
if(red(c1) == red(c2) && green(c1) == green(c2) && blue(c1) == blue(c2))
where you compare numbers from 0 - 255, the possible values of red or green or blue you can get from a colour. As for the "little bit similar" colours, you can set a threshold and any difference below that threshold will be considered negligible thus the colours are the same. Something like this:
int threshold = 5
if(abs(red(c1) red(c2)) < threshold && abs(green(c1) - green(c2)) < threshold && abs(blue(c1) == blue(c2)) < threshold)
Remember, you have to take the absolute difference! This way, if you decrease the threshold only very similar colours are considered the same while is you increase it different colours can be considered the same. That threshold number depends on your likings!
This would also work with your brightness example...
int threshold = 5
if(abs(brightness(c1) - brightness(c2)) < threshold)
To extend on Petros's answer. Generally, when I am comparing image pixels, I normalize, so that the code will work with images that are not in standard range 0-255. It also is good when you are doing many operations on the images to keep in mind the range you are currently working with for scaling purposes.
MAX_PIXEL=255 //maybe range is different for some reason
MIN_PIXEL=0
pixel_difference = 10
threshold = pixel_difference/(MAX_PIXEL-MIN_PIXEL)
if ( abs( (brightness(c1)-brightness(c2))/(MAX_PIXEL-MIN_PIXEL))< threshold ) {
//then the pixels are similar.
}
Sometimes you can gain more ground by transforming to a difference color space.
And depending on your task at hand you can build a background model that can adapt over time or compare higher level global features such as histograms or local features such as Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), or Corners, Edges.

How to fill a Direct3D texture with random RGB values. For use in a HLSL pixel shader

I am trying get 3 new random floats into my pixel shader for each pixel. Based on what I have read here, here, and also here, I believe that I need to generate a large texture containing random RGB values and then during each draw call randomly generate a couple of texture coordinate offset values to produce a pseudo-random effect. Is the only way to do this through the LockRect and UnlockRect API? I hope not.
They only way I have found to do this is the lock and unlock rectangle method. But it is much easier then I initially thought. Here is how I filled the texture.
'Create Random texture for dithering shader
rando = New Random()
randomText = New Texture(device, 1000, 1000, 1, Usage.Dynamic,
Format.A16B16G16R16, Pool.Default)
'89599
'89510
Dim data(1000 * 1000 * 8 + 1000 * 63 + 936) As Byte
rando.NextBytes(data)
Dim dataBox As DataRectangle =
randomText.GetSurfaceLevel(0).LockRectangle(LockFlags.None)
dataBox.Data.Seek(0, IO.SeekOrigin.Begin)
dataBox.Data.Write(data, 0, data.Length)
dataBox.Data.Close()
As you can see from the code I had to add a lot of extra bytes to completely fill the texture with random values. I used a 1000 x 1000 64bit texture so you would think I would need 1000*1000*8 Bytes of data but I need an extra 63936 Bytes to fill the texture and I am not sure why. But it seems to work for my needs.

Fade through more more natural rainbow spectrum in HSV/HSB

I'm trying to control some RGB LEDs and fade from red to violet. I'm using an HSV to RGB conversion so that I can just sweep from hue 0 to hue 300 (beyond that it moves back towards red). The problem I noticed though is that it seems to spend far to much time in the cyan and blue section of the spectrum. So I looked up what the HSV spectrum is supposed to look like, and found thisL
I didn't realize that more than half the spectrum was spent between green and blue.
But I'd really like it to look much more like this:
With a nice even blend of that "standard" rainbow colors.
I'd imagine that this would end up being some sort of s-curve of the normal hue values, but am not really sure how to calculate that curve.
An actual HSV to RGB algorithm that handles this internally would be great (any code really, though it's for an Arduino) but even just an explanation of how I could calculate that hue curve would be greatly appreciated.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/specrend/ has a fairly detailed description of how to convert a wavelength to CIE components (which roughly correspond to the outputs of the three kinds of cone sensors in your eyes) and then how to convert those to RGB values (with a warning that some wavelengths don't have RGB equivalents in a typical RGB gamut).
Or: there are various "perceptually uniform colour spaces" like CIE L*a*b* (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space); you could pick one of those, take equal steps along a straight line joining your starting and ending colours in that space, and convert to RGB.
Either of those is likely to be overkill for your application, though, and there's no obvious reason why they should be much -- or any -- better than something simpler and purely empirical. So why not do the following:
Choose your starting and ending colours. For simplicity, let's suppose they have S=1 and V=1 in HSV space. Note them down.
Look along the hue "spectrum" that you posted and find a colour that looks to you about halfway between your starting and ending points. Note this down.
Now bisect again: find colours halfway between start and mid, and halfway between mid and end.
Repeat once or twice more, so that you've divided the hue scale into 8 or 16 "perceptually equal" parts.
Convert to RGB, stick them in a lookup table, and interpolate linearly in between.
Tweak the RGB values a bit until you have something that looks good.
This is totally ad hoc and has nothing principled about it at all, but it'll probably work pretty well and the final code will be basically trivial:
void compute_rgb(int * rp, int * gp, int * bp, int t) {
// t in the range 0..255 (for convenience)
int segment = t>>5; // 0..7
int delta = t&31;
int a=rgb_table[segment].r, b=rgb_table[segment+1].r;
*rp = a + ((delta*(b-a))>>5);
a=rgb_table[segment].g; b=rgb_table[segment+1].g;
*gp = a + ((delta*(b-a))>>5);
a=rgb_table[segment].b; b=rgb_table[segment+1].b;
*bp = a + ((delta*(b-a))>>5);
}
(you can make the code somewhat clearer if you don't care about saving every available cycle).
For what it's worth, my eyes put division points at hue values of about (0), 40, 60, 90, 150, 180, 240, 270, (300). Your mileage may vary.
FastLED does a a version of this: https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/FastLED-HSV-Colors
HSLUV is another option: http://www.hsluv.org/. They have libraries in a bunch of different languages.
Also, this is an interesting technique: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4l2cDm
const float tau = acos(-1.)*2.;
void mainImage( out vec4 fragColor, in vec2 fragCoord )
{
vec2 uv = fragCoord.xy / iResolution.xy;
vec3 rainbow = sqrt( //gamma
sin( (uv.x+vec3(0,2,1)/3.)*tau ) * .5 + .5
);
fragColor.rgb = rainbow;
}
Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Number_of_colours_in_spectrum_or_rainbow for more info.

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