Just saw this potential Siggraph paper and thought it very interesting and potentially useful. Perhaps a Google SOC project for some bright young person.
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Lu_2014_DDS/index.php
The demo output (select a type and scroll down for each) looks just great.
http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Lu_201 ... index.html