Geodesic Polar Coordinates on Polygonal Meshes

Geodesic Polar Coordinates (GPCs) on a smooth surface S are local surface coordinates that relates a surface point to a planar parameter point by the length and direction of a corresponding geodesic curve onS . They are intrinsic to the surface and represent a natural local parameterization with useful properties. We present a simple and efficient algorithm to approximate GPCs on both triangle and general polygonal meshes. Our approach, named DGPC, is based on extending an existing algorithm for computing geodesic distance. We compare our approach with previous methods, both with respect to efficiency, accuracy and visual qualities when used for local mesh texturing. As a further application we show how the resulting coordinates can be used for vector space methods like local remeshing at interactive frame‐rates even for large meshes.     

An intrinsic algorithm for computing geodesic distance fields on triangle meshes with holes

As a fundamental concept, geodesics play an important role in many geometric modeling applications. However, geodesics are highly sensitive to topological changes; a small topological shortcut may result in a significantly large change of geodesic distance and path. Most of the existing discrete geodesic algorithms can only be applied to noise-free meshes. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to compute the meaningful approximate geodesics on polygonal meshes with holes. Without the explicit hole filling, our algorithm is completely intrinsic and independent of the embedding space; thus, it has the potential for isometrically deforming objects as well as meshes in high dimensional space. Furthermore, our method can guarantee the exact solution if the surface is developable. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm in both real-world and synthetic models.     

Geodesic-Controlled Developable Surfaces for Modeling Paper Bending

We present a novel and effective method for modeling a developable surface to simulate paper bending in interactive and animation applications. The method exploits the representation of a developable surface as the envelope of rectifying planes of a curve in 3D, which is therefore necessarily a geodesic on the surface. We manipulate the geodesic to provide intuitive shape control for modeling paper bending. Our method ensures a natural continuous isometric deformation from a piece of bent paper to its flat state without any stretching. Test examples show that the new scheme is fast, accurate, and easy to use, thus providing an effective approach to interactive paper bending. We also show how to handle non-convex piecewise smooth developable surfaces.     

Efficiently computing geodesic offsets on triangle meshes by the extended Xin–Wang algorithm

Geodesic offset curves are important for many industrial applications, such as solid modeling, robot-path planning, the generation of tool paths for NC machining, etc. Although the offset problem is well studied in classical differential geometry and computer-aided design, where the underlying surface is sufficiently smooth, very few algorithms are available for computing geodesic offsets on discrete representation, in which the input is typically a polyline curve restricted on a piecewise linear mesh. In this paper, we propose an efficient and exact algorithm to compute the geodesic offsets on triangle meshes by extending the Xin–Wang algorithm of discrete geodesics. We define a new data structure called parallel-source windows, and extend both the “one angle one split” and the filtering theorem to maintain the window tree. Similar to the original Xin–Wang algorithm, our extended algorithm has an O(n) space complexity and an O(n²logn) asymptotic time complexity, where n is the number of vertices on the input mesh. We tested our algorithm on numerous real-world models and showed that our algorithm is exact, efficient and robust, and can be applied to large scale models with complicated geometry and topology.     

Simultaneous aligning and smoothing of surface triangulations

In this work we develop a procedure to deform a given surface triangulation to obtain its alignment with interior curves. These curves are defined by splines in a parametric space and, subsequently, mapped to the surface triangulation. We have restricted our study to orthogonal mapping, so we require the curves to be included in a patch of the surface that can be orthogonally projected onto a plane (our parametric space). For example, the curves can represent interfaces between different materials or boundary conditions, internal boundaries or feature lines. Another setting in which this procedure can be used is the adaption of a reference mesh to changing curves in the course of an evolutionary process. Specifically, we propose a new method that moves the nodes of the mesh, maintaining its topology, in order to achieve two objectives simultaneously: the piecewise approximation of the curves by edges of the surface triangulation and the optimization of the resulting mesh. We will designate this procedure as projecting/smoothing method and it is based on the smoothing technique that we have introduced for surface triangulations in previous works. The mesh quality improvement is obtained by an iterative process where each free node is moved to a new position that minimizes a certain objective function. The minimization process is done on the parametric plane attending to the surface piece-wise approximation and to an algebraic quality measure (mean ratio) of the set of triangles that are connected to the free node. So, the 3-D local projecting/smoothing problem is reduced to a 2-D optimization problem. Several applications of this method are presented.     

Multiresolution analysis on irregular surface meshes

Wavelet-based methods have proven their efficiency for visualization at different levels of detail, progressive transmission, and compression of large data sets. The required core of all wavelet-based methods is a hierarchy of meshes that satisfies subdivision-connectivity. This hierarchy has to be the result of a subdivision process starting from a base mesh. Examples include quadtree uniform 2D meshes, octree uniform 3D meshes, or 4-to-1 split triangular meshes. In particular, the necessity of subdivision-connectivity prevents the application of wavelet-based methods on irregular triangular meshes. In this paper, a “wavelet-like” decomposition is introduced that works on piecewise constant data sets over irregular triangular surface meshes. The decomposition/reconstruction algorithms are based on an extension of wavelet-theory allowing hierarchical meshes without property. Among others, this approach has the following features: it allows exact reconstruction of the data set, even for nonregular triangulations, and it extends previous results on Haar-wavelets over 4-to-1 split triangulations     

Mesh Parametrization Driven by Unit Normal Flow

Based on mesh deformation, we present a unified mesh parametrization algorithm for both planar and spherical domains. Our approach can produce intermediate frames from the original meshes to the targets. We derive and define a novel geometric flow: ‘unit normal flow (UNF)’ and prove that if UNF converges, it will deform a surface to a constant mean curvature (CMC) surface, such as planes and spheres. Our method works by deforming meshes of disk topology to planes, and spherical meshes to spheres. Our algorithm is robust, efficient, simple to implement. To demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method, we apply it to hundreds of models of varying complexities. Our experiments show that our algorithm can be a competing alternative approach to other state-of-the-art mesh parametrization methods. The unit normal flow also suggests a potential direction for creating CMC surfaces.     

基于聚类的本征距离简化以及测地距估算

测地距是曲面上两点之间最短的距离,它在几何分析和运算中起非常重要的作用。目前精确计算测地距方法的时间复杂度非常大,为了加快测地距的估算,提出了通过分析网格模型的本征距离来快速估算任意两点间测地距的算法。首先根据网格模型的第一基本式对其进行聚类分块,然后通过调整其参数化方式将每块的共形参数模型简化为二次曲面模型,最后通过共形参数对测地距进行快速估算。实验结果表明,该方法可以极大地减少计算时间,快速地估算出网格模型上位于不同块上的任意两点间测地距。     

Efficiently computing exact geodesic loops within finite steps

Closed geodesics, or geodesic loops, are crucial to the study of differential topology and differential geometry. Although the existence and properties of closed geodesics on smooth surfaces have been widely studied in mathematics community, relatively little progress has been made on how to compute them on polygonal surfaces. Most existing algorithms simply consider the mesh as a graph and so the resultant loops are restricted only on mesh edges, which are far from the actual geodesics. This paper is the first to prove the existence and uniqueness of geodesic loop restricted on a closed face sequence; it contributes also with an efficient algorithm to iteratively evolve an initial closed path on a given mesh into an exact geodesic loop within finite steps. Our proposed algorithm takes only an O(k) space complexity and an O(mk) time complexity (experimentally), where m is the number of vertices in the region bounded by the initial loop and the resultant geodesic loop, and k is the average number of edges in the edge sequences that the evolving loop passes through. In contrast to the existing geodesic curvature flow methods which compute an approximate geodesic loop within a predefined threshold, our method is exact and can apply directly to triangular meshes without needing to solve any differential equation with a numerical solver; it can run at interactive speed, e.g., in the order of milliseconds, for a mesh with around 50K vertices, and hence, significantly outperforms existing algorithms. Actually, our algorithm could run at interactive speed even for larger meshes. Besides the complexity of the input mesh, the geometric shape could also affect the number of evolving steps, i.e., the performance. We motivate our algorithm with an interactive shape segmentation example shown later in the paper.     

On discrete boundaries and solution accuracy in anisotropic adaptive meshing

In the adaptive mesh generation, the space mesh should be adequate to the surface mesh. When the analytical surface representation is not known, additional surface information may be extracted from triangular surface meshes. We describe a new surface reconstruction method which uses approximate Hessian of a piecewise linear function representing the discrete surface. Efficiency of the proposed method is illustrated with two CFD applications.     

Optimal Error Estimates of the Local Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Surface Diffusion of Graphs on Cartesian Meshes

In (Xu and Shu in J. Sci. Comput. 40:375–390, 2009), a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for the surface diffusion of graphs was developed and a rigorous proof for its energy stability was given. Numerical simulation results showed the optimal order of accuracy. In this subsequent paper, we concentrate on analyzing a priori error estimates of the LDG method for the surface diffusion of graphs. The main achievement is the derivation of the optimal convergence rate k+1 in the L ² norm in one-dimension as well as in multi-dimensions for Cartesian meshes using a completely discontinuous piecewise polynomial space with degree k≥1.     

Geodesic Remeshing Using Front Propagation

In this paper, we propose a complete framework for 3D geometry modeling and processing that uses only fast geodesic computations. The basic building block for these techniques is a novel greedy algorithm to perform a uniform or adaptive remeshing of a triangulated surface. Our other contributions include a parameterization scheme based on barycentric coordinates, an intrinsic algorithm for computing geodesic centroidal tessellations, and a fast and robust method to flatten a genus-0 surface patch. On large meshes (more than 500,000 vertices), our techniques speed up computation by over one order of magnitude in comparison to classical remeshing and parameterization methods. Our methods are easy to implement and do not need multilevel solvers to handle complex models that may contain poorly shaped triangles.     

Walking On Broken Mesh: Defect‐Tolerant Geodesic Distances and Parameterizations

Efficient methods to compute intrinsic distances and geodesic paths have been presented for various types of surface representations, most importantly polygon meshes. These meshes are usually assumed to be well‐structured and manifold. In practice, however, they often contain defects like holes, gaps, degeneracies, non‐manifold configurations – or they might even be just a soup of polygons. The task of repairing these defects is computationally complex and in many cases exhibits various ambiguities demanding tedious manual efforts. We present a computational framework that enables the computation of meaningful approximate intrinsic distances and geodesic paths on raw meshes in a way which is tolerant to such defects. Holes and gaps are bridged up to a user‐specified tolerance threshold such that distances can be computed plausibly even across multiple connected components of inconsistent meshes. Further, we show ways to locally parameterize a surface based on geodesic distance fields, easily facilitating the application of textures and decals on raw meshes. We do all this without explicitly repairing the input, thereby avoiding the costly additional efforts. In order to enable broad applicability we provide details on two implementation variants, one optimized for performance, the other optimized for memory efficiency. Using the presented framework many applications can readily be extended to deal with imperfect meshes. Since we abstract from the input applicability is not even limited to meshes, other representations can be handled as well.     

A finite volume discontinuous Galerkin scheme¶for nonlinear convection–diffusion problems

A popular method for the discretization of conservation laws is the finite volume (FV) method, used extensively in CFD, based on piecewise constant approximation of the solution sought. However, the FV method has problems with the approximation of diffusion terms. Therefore, in several works [17–19, 1, 12, 16, 2], a combination of the FV and FE methods is used. To this end, it is necessary to construct various combinations of simplicial FE meshes with suitable associated FV grids. This is rather complicated from the point of view of the mesh refinement, particularly in 3D problems [20, 21]. It is desirable to use only one mesh. The combination of FV and FE discretizations on the same triangular grid is proposed in [39]. Another possibility is to use the DG method (see [7] or [9] (and the references there) for a general survey). Here we shall use a compromise between the DG FE method and the FV method using piecewise linear discontinuous finite elements over the grid ? _h and piecewise constant approximation of convective terms on the same grid. Dedicated to Professor Ivo Babuška on the occasion of his 75th birthday Received: May 2001 / Accepted: September 2001     

Elastic Correspondence between Triangle Meshes

We propose a novel approach for shape matching between triangular meshes that, in contrast to existing methods, can match crease features. Our approach is based on a hybrid optimization scheme, that solves simultaneously for an elastic deformation of the source and its projection on the target. The elastic energy we minimize is invariant to rigid body motions, and its non‐linear membrane energy component favors locally injective maps. Symmetrizing this model enables feature aligned correspondences even for non‐isometric meshes. We demonstrate the advantage of our approach over state of the art methods on isometric and non‐isometric datasets, where we improve the geodesic distance from the ground truth, the conformal and area distortions, and the mismatch of the mean curvature functions. Finally, we show that our computed maps are applicable for surface interpolation, consistent cross‐field computation, and consistent quadrangular remeshing of a set of shapes.     

不规则网格上的曲面设计方法

提出一种在不规则网格上构造曲面的方法.其基本思想是,通过均匀双三次B样条基函数的分解和子基函数的分类,将B样条曲面方法推广到任意四边形网格.给定一个任意四边形控制网格,首先对每个控制点构造一个基函数;所有控制点加权组合形成整体曲面.构造的曲面是分片双三次有理参数多项式曲面.此方法可以看成是均匀B样条曲面构造方法的扩展,如果控制网格是规则四边形网格,那么构造得到的曲面与均匀双三次B样条曲面是一致的.最后,实例证明此方法能够有效地构造曲面.     

Surface remeshing with robust high-order reconstruction

Remeshing is an important problem in variety of applications, such as finite element methods and geometry processing. Surface remeshing poses some unique challenges, as it must deliver not only good mesh quality but also good geometric accuracy. For applications such as finite elements with high-order elements (quadratic or cubic elements), the geometry must be preserved to high-order (third-order or higher) accuracy, since low-order accuracy may undermine the convergence of numerical computations. The problem is particularly challenging if the CAD model is not available for the underlying geometry, and is even more so if the surface meshes contain some inverted elements. We describe remeshing strategies that can simultaneously produce high-quality triangular meshes, untangling mildly folded triangles and preserve the geometry to high-order of accuracy. Our approach extends our earlier works on high-order surface reconstruction and mesh optimization by enhancing its robustness with a geometric limiter for under-resolved geometries. We also integrate high-order surface reconstruction with surface mesh adaptation techniques, which alter the number of triangles and nodes. We demonstrate the utilization of our method to meshes for high-order finite elements, biomedical image-based surface meshes, and complex interface meshes in fluid simulations.     

Heat method of non-uniform diffusion for computing geodesic distance on images and surfaces

This paper presents a non-uniform heat method to calculate geodesic distance and geodesic curves on the images and surfaces. Different from the varadhan’s formula-based heat method, our non-uniform heat method first finds the direction of distance increases by heat diffusion, and then recovers the geodesic distance by solving a Poisson equation. Various heat diffusion metrics obtained from different potentials and tensors, such as intensity-based metrics, gradient-based metrics, and anisotropy metrics et., describe the differences of geodesic distances in various regions. Combined with automatic geodesic segmentation technology, our heat method can be effectively and quickly applied to centerlines extraction and salient curves detection in images, skeleton extraction of shapes, and 3D path planning on surfaces. Two categories of discretization algorithms on scattered points and triangle meshes are more flexible and can often be used to more complicated cases. The algorithm is robust and simple to implement since it is based on solving a pair of standard sparse linear systems. Pre-calculation also greatly reduces time consumption and memory footprint.

     

Optimized Sub-Sampling of Point Sets for Surface Splatting

Using surface splats as a rendering primitive has gained increasing attention recently due to its potential for high‐performance and high‐quality rendering of complex geometric models. However, as with any other rendering primitive, the processing costs are still proportional to the number of primitives that we use to represent a given object. This is why complexity reduction for point‐sampled geometry is as important as it is, e.g., for triangle meshes. In this paper we present a new sub‐sampling technique for dense point clouds which is specifically adjusted to the particular geometric properties of circular or elliptical surface splats. A global optimization scheme computes an approximately minimal set of splats that covers the entire surface while staying below a globally prescribed maximum error toleranceε. Since our algorithm converts pure point sample data into surface splats with normal vectors and spatial extent, it can also be considered as a surface reconstruction technique which generates a hole‐free piecewise linearC^?1 continuous approximation of the input data. Here we can exploit the higher flexibility of surface splats compared to triangle meshes. Compared to previous work in this area we are able to obtain significantly lower splat numbers for a given error tolerance.     

Stability of Lagrange elements for the mixed Laplacian

The stability properties of simple element choices for the mixed formulation of the Laplacian are investigated numerically. The element choices studied use vector Lagrange elements, i.e., the space of continuous piecewise polynomial vector fields of degree at most r, for the vector variable, and the divergence of this space, which consists of discontinuous piecewise polynomials of one degree lower, for the scalar variable. For polynomial degrees r equal 2 or 3, this pair of spaces was found to be stable for all mesh families tested. In particular, it is stable on diagonal mesh families, in contrast to its behavior for the Stokes equations. For degree r equal 1, stability holds for some meshes, but not for others. Additionally, convergence was observed precisely for the methods that were observed to be stable. However, it seems that optimal order L ² estimates for the vector variable, known to hold for r>3, do not hold for lower degrees.