Identifying rectangles in laser range data for urban scene reconstruction

In urban scenes, many of the surfaces are planar and bounded by simple shapes. In a laser scan of such a scene, these simple shapes can still be identified. We present a one-parameter algorithm that can identify point sets on a plane for which a rectangle is a fitting boundary. These rectangles have a guaranteed density: no large part of the rectangle is empty of points. We prove that our algorithm identifies all angles for which a rectangle fits the point set of size n in O(nlogn) time. We evaluate our method experimentally on 13 urban data sets and we compare the rectangles found by our algorithm to the α‐shape as a surface boundary.     

Surface reconstruction using Delaunay triangulation for applications in life sciences

The Delaunay triangulation is an established method to define neighborhood relations in multi-particle systems. In particular, this method was employed for interacting multi-cellular systems in Biology. The extension of this method to a sub-cellular level that considers the membrane and the inner structure of cells is not straight forward and subject of this article. It is the objective to use a three-dimensional Delaunay-triangulation as a basis for the definition of a triangulation of a subset of particles that form a surface.An essential problem of this objective is the conservation of the number of particles belonging to the surface. This excludes established surface reconstruction algorithms. The presented algorithm allows the definition of a triangulation within a subset of particles attributed to a surface without the deletion of particles. A particular challenge is the deletion of connection that infer three-dimensional structures in the surface. The presented method is suitable for many configurations. Its performance and its limitations are analyzed and discussed.The developed algorithm for the reconstruction of connections in a surface is suitable to be used for simulations of biological cells because of the inherent conservation of the number of particles attributed to the membrane.     

Hierarchical B-splines on regular triangular partitions

Multivariate splines have a wide range of applications in function approximation, finite element analysis and geometric modeling. They have been extensively studied in the last several decades, and specially the theory on bivariate B-splines over regular triangular partition is well developed. However, the above mentioned splines do not have local refinement property – a property that is very important in adaptive function approximation and level of detailed representation of geometric models. In this paper, we introduce the concept of hierarchial bivariate splines over regular triangular partitions and construct basis functions of such spline space that satisfy some nice properties. We provide some examples of hierarchical splines over triangular partitions in surface fitting and in solving numerical PDEs, and the results turn out to be promising.     

Isotropic Surface Remeshing Using Constrained Centroidal Delaunay Mesh

We develop a novel isotropic remeshing method based on constrained centroidal Delaunay mesh (CCDM), a generalization of centroidal patch triangulation from 2D to mesh surface. Our method starts with resampling an input mesh with a vertex distribution according to a user‐defined density function. The initial remeshing result is then progressively optimized by alternatively recovering the Delaunay mesh and moving each vertex to the centroid of its 1‐ring neighborhood. The key to making such simple iterations work is an efficient optimization framework that combines both local and global optimization methods. Our method is parameterization‐free, thus avoiding the metric distortion introduced by parameterization, and generating more well‐shaped triangles. Our method guarantees that the topology of surface is preserved without requiring geodesic information. We conduct various experiments to demonstrate the simplicity, efficacy, and robustness of the presented method.     

A Weighted Delaunay Triangulation Framework for Merging Triangulations in a Connectivity Oblivious Fashion

Simplicial meshes are useful as discrete approximations of continuous spaces in numerical simulations. In some applications, however, meshes need to be modified over time. Mesh update operations are often expensive and brittle, making the simulations unstable. In this paper we propose a framework for updating simplicial meshes that undergo geometric and topological changes. Instead of explicitly maintaining connectivity information, we keep a collection of weights associated with mesh vertices, using a Weighted Delaunay Triangulation (WDT). These weights implicitly define mesh connectivity and allow direct merging of triangulations. We propose two formulations for computing the weights, and two techniques for merging triangulations, and finally illustrate our results with examples in two and three dimensions.     

Filtering Relocations on a Delaunay Triangulation

Updating a Delaunay triangulation when its vertices move is a bottleneck in several domains of application. Rebuilding the whole triangulation from scratch is surprisingly a very viable option compared to relocating the vertices. This can be explained by several recent advances in efficient construction of Delaunay triangulations. However, when all points move with a small magnitude, or when only a fraction of the vertices move, rebuilding is no longer the best option. This paper considers the problem of efficiently updating a Delaunay triangulation when its vertices are moving under small perturbations. The main contribution is a set of filters based upon the concept of vertex tolerances. Experiments show that filtering relocations is faster than rebuilding the whole triangulation from scratch under certain conditions.     

A Note on Point Location in Delaunay Triangulations of Random Points

This short note considers the problem of point location in a Delaunay triangulation of n random points, using no additional preprocessing or storage other than a standard data structure representing the triangulation. A simple and easy-to-implement (but, of course, worst-case suboptimal) heuristic is shown to take expected time O(n ^1/3 ) . Received November 27, 1997; revised February 15, 1998.     

A divide-and-conquer approach for automatic polycube map construction

Polycube map is a global cross-surface parameterization technique, where the polycube shape can roughly approximate the geometry of modeled objects while retaining the same topology. The large variation of shape geometry and its complex topological type in real-world applications make it difficult to effectively construct a high-quality polycube that can serve as a good global parametric domain for a given object. In practice, existing polycube map construction algorithms typically require a large amount of user interaction for either pre-constructing the polycubes with great care or interactively specifying the geometric constraints to arrive at the user-satisfied maps. Hence, it is tedious and labor intensive to construct polycube maps for surfaces of complicated geometry and topology. This paper aims to develop an effective method to construct polycube maps for surfaces with complicated topology and geometry. Using our method, users can simply specify how close the target polycube mimics a given shape in a quantitative way. Our algorithm can both construct a similar polycube of high geometric fidelity and compute a high-quality polycube map in an automatic fashion. In addition, our method is theoretically guaranteed to output a one-to-one map. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we apply the automatically-constructed polycube maps in a number of computer graphics applications, such as seamless texture tiling, T-spline construction, and quadrilateral mesh generation.     

QuadCover - Surface Parameterization using Branched Coverings

We introduce an algorithm for the automatic computation of global parameterizations on arbitrary simplicial 2-manifolds, whose parameter lines are guided by a given frame field, for example, by principal curvature frames. The parameter lines are globally continuous and allow a remeshing of the surface into quadrilaterals. The algorithm converts a given frame field into a single vector field on a branched covering of the 2-manifold and generates an integrable vector field by a Hodge decomposition on the covering space. Except for an optional smoothing and alignment of the initial frame field, the algorithm is fully automatic and generates high quality quadrilateral meshes.     

Autocorrelation Descriptor for Efficient Co‐Alignment of 3D Shape Collections

Co‐aligning a collection of shapes to a consistent pose is a common problem in shape analysis with applications in shape matching, retrieval and visualization. We observe that resolving among some orientations is easier than others, for example, a common mistake for bicycles is to align front‐to‐back, while even the simplest algorithm would not erroneously pick orthogonal alignment. The key idea of our work is to analyse rotational autocorrelations of shapes to facilitate shape co‐alignment. In particular, we use such an autocorrelation measure of individual shapes to decide which shape pairs might have well‐matching orientations; and, if so, which configurations are likely to produce better alignments. This significantly prunes the number of alignments to be examined, and leads to an efficient, scalable algorithm that performs comparably to state‐of‐the‐art techniques on benchmark data sets, but requires significantly fewer computations, resulting in 2–16× speed improvement in our tests.     

Real-Time GPU Silhouette Refinement using Adaptively Blended Bézier Patches

We present an algorithm for detecting and extracting the silhouette edges of a triangle mesh in real time using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). We also propose a tessellation strategy for visualizing the mesh with smooth silhouettes through a continuous blend between Bézier patches with varying level of detail. Furthermore, we show how our techniques can be integrated with displacement and normal mapping. We give details on our GPU implementation and provide a performance analysis with respect to mesh size.     

A Survey on Shape Correspondence

We review methods designed to compute correspondences between geometric shapes represented by triangle meshes, contours or point sets. This survey is motivated in part by recent developments in space–time registration, where one seeks a correspondence between non‐rigid and time‐varying surfaces, and semantic shape analysis, which underlines a recent trend to incorporate shape understanding into the analysis pipeline. Establishing a meaningful correspondence between shapes is often difficult because it generally requires an understanding of the structure of the shapes at both the local and global levels, and sometimes the functionality of the shape parts as well. Despite its inherent complexity, shape correspondence is a recurrent problem and an essential component of numerous geometry processing applications. In this survey, we discuss the different forms of the correspondence problem and review the main solution methods, aided by several classification criteria arising from the problem definition. The main categories of classification are defined in terms of the input and output representation, objective function and solution approach. We conclude the survey by discussing open problems and future perspectives.     

A Survey on Procedural Modelling for Virtual Worlds

Procedural modelling deals with (semi‐)automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modelling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non‐technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modelling.     

Patch‐Collaborative Spectral Point‐Cloud Denoising

We present a new framework for point cloud denoising by patch‐collaborative spectral analysis. A collaborative generalization of each surface patch is defined, combining similar patches from the denoised surface. The Laplace–Beltrami operator of the collaborative patch is then used to selectively smooth the surface in a robust manner that can gracefully handle high levels of noise, yet preserves sharp surface features. The resulting denoising algorithm competes favourably with state‐of‐the‐art approaches, and extends patch‐based algorithms from the image processing domain to point clouds of arbitrary sampling. We demonstrate the accuracy and noise‐robustness of the proposed algorithm on standard benchmark models as well as range scans, and compare it to existing methods for point cloud denoising.