Computer graphics has evolved over the past four decades into an exciting and fruitful field of computer application that profoundly affects numerous aspects of our lives. Computer graphics technology is being applied successfully in the areas of education, engineering, entertainment, medicine, science, and technology. The Pacific Graphics Conference is an annual conference that provides an international forum for presentation and discussion of the latest developments in computer graphics research and applications. Since its inception in 1993, Pacific Graphics has played an important role in promoting computer graphics in the Asian Pacific region by facilitating research exchanges among researchers from all over the world.
Pacific Graphics 2000 (PG 2000) was held on October 3 to October 5, 2000, at the Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel and Towers, Hong Kong, China. PG 2000 received 121 submissions, which is a record high in the history of the conference, showing the increasing influence of the Pacific Graphics conference series. There were 40 regular papers presented at PG 2000.
This special issue of Graphical Models contains four papers of high quality that were presented at PG 2000. These papers were selected on the basis of reviewers' recommendations and have been extended and enhanced through one more round of reviewing before their publication in this special issue. A special issue of the journal Computer Graphics Forum contains three other selected papers that were presented at Pacific Graphics 2000.
The first paper in this special issue, by Lensch, Heidrich, and Seidel, discusses using camera position and image registration techniques to map textures obtained from photographs to a 3D surface model, which is a key problem in increasingly important application of 3D model reconstruction and image-based rendering. The second paper, by Kronrod and Gotsman, presents an efficient coding scheme for the connectivity information of polygonal meshes; this scheme is shown to be equivalent to the Edgebreaker algorithm for triangular meshes but it also achieves short code length for general polygonal meshes. The third paper, by C. Chen, F. Chen, and Y. Feng, studies using low-degree piecewise algebraic surfaces to construct blending surfaces; with the success of their approach adequately demonstrated by a number of examples. The last paper, by Heo et al., presents a method for computing the intersection curve of two ringed surfaces by finding the zero-set of a bivariate function in a parameter space. The authors note that this reduction technique is applicable to computing intersections of a wider class of parametric surfaces, including rational ruled surfaces and simple sweep surface.
We believe that the quality of these papers, as well as the significance of the results obtained therein, will be appreciated by the readership of Graphical Models, and we hope that the arrangement of such a special issue of Graphical Models can further elevate the international recognition of the Pacific Graphics Conference.
We thank the chief editor of Graphical Models, Professor Norman Badler, for his support in publishing this special issue.