Ramsay Dyer

Spectral Methods for Mesh Processing and Analysis

Spectral methods for mesh processing and analysis rely on the eigenvalues, eigenvectors, or eigenspace projections derived from appropriately defined mesh operators to carry out desired tasks. Early works in this area can be traced back to the seminal paper by Taubin in 1995, where spectral analysis of mesh geometry based on a combinatorial Laplacian aids our understanding of the low-pass filtering approach to mesh smoothing. Over the past ten years or so, the list of applications in the area of geometry processing which utilize the eigenstructures of a variety of mesh operators in different manners have been growing steadily. Many works presented so far draw parallels from developments in fields such as graph theory, computer vision, machine learning, graph drawing, numerical linear algebra, and high-performance computing. This state-of-the-art report aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the spectral approach, focusing on its power and versatility in solving geometry processing problems and attempting to bridge the gap between relevant research in computer graphics and other fields. Necessary theoretical background will be provided and existing works will be classified according to different criteria — the operators or eigenstructures employed, application domains, or the dimensionality of the spectral embeddings used — and described in adequate length. Finally, despite much empirical success, there still remain many open questions pertaining to the spectral approach, which we will discuss in the report as well.

Spectral Mesh Processing

Spectral methods for mesh processing and analysis rely on the eigenvalues, eigenvectors, or eigenspace projections derived from appropriately defined mesh operators to carry out desired tasks. Early work in this area can be traced back to the seminal paper by Taubin in 1995, where spectral analysis of mesh geometry based on a combinatorial Laplacian aids our understanding of the low‐pass filtering approach to mesh smoothing. Over the past 15 years, the list of applications in the area of geometry processing which utilize the eigenstructures of a variety of mesh operators in different manners have been growing steadily. Many works presented so far draw parallels from developments in fields such as graph theory, computer vision, machine learning, graph drawing, numerical linear algebra, and high‐performance computing. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the spectral approach, focusing on its power and versatility in solving geometry processing problems and attempting to bridge the gap between relevant research in computer graphics and other fields. Necessary theoretical background is provided. Existing works covered are classified according to different criteria: the operators or eigenstructures employed, application domains, or the dimensionality of the spectral embeddings used. Despite much empirical success, there still remain many open questions pertaining to the spectral approach. These are discussed as we conclude the survey and provide our perspective on possible future research.

Linear and Cubic Box Splines for the Body Centered Cubic Lattice

We derive piecewise linear and piecewise cubic box spline reconstruction filters for data sampled on the body centered cubic (BCC) lattice. We analytically derive a time domain representation of these reconstruction filters and using the Fourier slice-projection theorem we derive their frequency responses. The quality of these filters, when used in reconstructing BCC sampled volumetric data, is discussed and is demonstrated with a raycaster. Moreover, to demonstrate the superiority of the BCC sampling, the resulting reconstructions are compared with those produced from similar filters applied to data sampled on the Cartesian lattice.

Delaunay mesh construction

We present algorithms to produce Delaunay meshes from arbitrary triangle meshes by edge flipping and geometrypreserving refinement and prove their correctness. In particular we show that edge flipping serves to reduce mesh surface area, and that a poorly sampled input mesh may yield unflippable edges necessitating refinement to ensure a Delaunay mesh output. Multiresolution Delaunay meshes can be obtained via constrained mesh decimation. We further examine the usefulness of trading off the geometry-preserving feature of our algorithm with the ability to create fewer triangles. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms through several experiments.

Surface sampling and the intrinsic Voronoi diagram

We develop adaptive sampling criteria which guarantee a topologically faithful mesh and demonstrate an improvement and simplification over earlier results, albeit restricted to 2D surfaces. These sampling criteria are based on functions defined by intrinsic properties of the surface: the strong convexity radius and the injectivity radius. We establish inequalities that relate these functions to the local feature size, thus enabling a comparison between the demands of the intrinsic sampling criteria and those based on Euclidean distances and the medial axis.

Multi-scale partial intrinsic symmetry detection

We present an algorithm for multi-scale partial intrinsic symmetry detection over 2D and 3D shapes, where the scale of a symmetric region is defined by intrinsic distances between symmetric points over the region. To identify prominent symmetric regions which overlap and vary in form and scale, we decouple scale extraction and symmetry extraction by performing two levels of clustering. First, significant symmetry scales are identified by clustering sample point pairs from an input shape. Since different point pairs can share a common point, shape regions covered by points in different scale clusters can overlap. We introduce the symmetry scale matrix (SSM), where each entry estimates the likelihood two point pairs belong to symmetries at the same scale. The pair-to-pair symmetry affinity is computed based on a pair signature which encodes scales. We perform spectral clustering using the SSM to obtain the scale clusters. Then for all points belonging to the same scale cluster, we perform the second-level spectral clustering, based on a novel point-to-point symmetry affinity measure, to extract partial symmetries at that scale. We demonstrate our algorithm on complex shapes possessing rich symmetries at multiple scales.

THE STABILITY OF DELAUNAY TRIANGULATIONS

We introduce a parametrized notion of genericity for Delaunay triangulations which, in particular, implies that the Delaunay simplices of δ-generic point sets are thick. Equipped with this notion, we study the stability of Delaunay triangulations under perturbations of the metric and of the vertex positions. We quantify the magnitude of the perturbations under which the Delaunay triangulation remains unchanged.

Delaunay Triangulation of Manifolds

We present an algorithm for producing Delaunay triangulations of manifolds. The algorithm can accommodate abstract manifolds that are not presented as submanifolds of Euclidean space. Given a set of sample points and an atlas on a compact manifold, a manifold Delaunay complex is produced for a perturbed point set provided the transition functions are bi-Lipschitz with a constant close to 1, and the original sample points meet a local density requirement; no smoothness assumptions are required. If the transition functions are smooth, the output is a triangulation of the manifold. The output complex is naturally endowed with a piecewise-flat metric which, when the original manifold is Riemannian, is a close approximation of the original Riemannian metric. In this case the output complex is also a Delaunay triangulation of its vertices with respect to this piecewise-flat metric.

Stability of Delaunay-type structures for manifolds: [extended abstract]

We introduce a parametrized notion of genericity for Delaunay triangulations which, in particular, implies that the Delaunay simplices of δ-generic point sets are thick. Equipped with this notion, we study the stability of Delaunay triangulations under perturbations of the metric and of the vertex positions. We then show that, for any sufficiently regular submanifold of Euclidean space, and appropriate ε and δ, any sample set which meets a localized δ-generic ε-dense sampling criteria yields a manifold intrinsic Delaunay complex which is equal to the restricted Delaunay complex.

Voronoi-Delaunay duality and Delaunay meshes

We define a Delaunay mesh to be a manifold triangle mesh whose edges form an intrinsic Delaunay triangulation or iDT of its vertices, where the triangulated domain is the piecewise flat mesh surface. We show that meshes constructed from a smooth surface by taking an iDT or a restricted Delaunay triangulation, do not in general yield a Delaunay mesh. We establish a precise dual relationship between the iDT and the Voronoi tessellation of the vertices of a piecewise flat (pwf) surface and exploit this duality to demonstrate criteria which ensure the existence of a proper Delaunay triangulation.