Merging Cellular Automata for Simulating Surface Effects

This paper describes a model of three-dimensional cellular automata allowing to simulate different phenomena in the fields of computer graphics and image processing, and to combine them together in order to produce complex effects such as automatic multitexturing, surface imperfections, or biological retina multi-layer cellular behaviours. Our cellular automaton model is defined as a network of connected cells arranged in a natural and dynamic way, which affords multi-behavior capabilities. Based on cheap and widespread computing systems, real-time performance can be reached for simulations involving up to a hundred thousand cells. Our approach efficiency is illustrated through a set of CA related to computer graphics –e.g. erosion, sedimentation, or vegetal growing processes– and image analysis –e.g. pipeline retina simulation.