Ricci flow deformsthe Riemannian metric proportionallyto the curvature, such that the curvatureevolves accordingto a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far. This work introduces the unified theoretic framework for discrete Surface Ricci Flow, including all the common schemes: Tangential Circle Packing, Thurston’s Circle Packing, Inversive Distance Circle Packing and Discrete Yamabe Flow. Furthermore, this work also introduces a novel schemes, Virtual Radius Circle Packing and the Mixed Type schemes, under the unified framework. This work gives explicit geometric interpretation to the discrete Ricci energies for all the schemes with all back ground geometries, and the corresponding Hessian matrices. The unified frame work deepens our understanding to the the discrete surface Ricci flow theory, and has inspired us to discover the new schemes, improved the flexibility and robustness of the algorithms, greatly simplified the implementation and improved the efficiency. Experimental results show the unified surface Ricci flow algorithms can handle general surfaces with different topologies, and is robust to meshes with different qualities, and is effective for solving real problems.

Surface parameterizations and registrations are important in computer graphics and imaging, where 1-1 correspondences between meshes are computed. In practice, surface maps are usually represented and stored as three-dimensional coordinates each vertex is mapped to, which often requires lots of memory. This causes inconvenience in data transmission and data storage. To tackle this problem, we propose an effective algorithm for compressing surface homeomorphisms using Fourier approximation of the Beltrami representation. The Beltrami representation is a complex-valued function defined on triangular faces of the surface mesh with supreme norm strictly less than 1. Under suitable normalization, there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of surface homeomorphisms and the set of Beltrami representations. Hence, every bijective surface map is associated with a unique Beltrami representation. Conversely, given a Beltrami representation, the corresponding bijective surface map can be exactly reconstructed using the linear Beltrami solver introduced in this paper. Using the Beltrami representation, the surface homeomorphism can be easily compressed by Fourier approximation, without distorting the bijectivity of the map. The storage requirement can be effectively reduced, which is useful for many practical problems in computer graphics and imaging. In this paper, we propose applying the algorithm to texture map compression and video compression. With our proposed algorithm, the storage requirement for the texture properties of a textured surface can be significantly reduced. Our algorithm can further be applied to compressing motion vector fields for video compression, which effectively improves the compression ratio.

Automatic hexahedral mesh generation plays a fundamental role in CAD/CAE fields, especially for IGA (isogeometric analysis). Recently, an automatic hex-mesh generation method has been proposed, which is based on the equivalence among three key concepts: colorable quadrilateral meshes, finite measured foliations and Strebel differentials. This work focuses on the computational aspect of Strebel differentials on high genus surfaces, which is based on graph-valued harmonic mapping. The algorithmic pipeline is as follows: first, the user inputs an admissible curve system, which induces a cylindric-decomposition graph; then the user specifies the lengths of the edges of the graph; third, the algorithm finds the unique harmonic map from the surface to the metric graph by a non-linear heat flow; finally, the harmonic map induces a Strebel differential, which can be further utilized to generate the hex-mesh. The method has solid theoretic foundation, which guarantees the existence and the uniqueness of the graph-valued harmonic map. The algorithm is capable of handling surfaces with complicated topologies, and producing all possible Strebel differentials on the surface. The user has full control of the combinatorial type and the geometry of the Strebel differential. The computational pipeline is automatic. The experimental results show the efficiency and efficacy of the algorithm, and demonstrate the great potential for automating the structured hexahedral mesh generation.

In this work, we give a geometric interpretation to the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The geometric view is based on the intrinsic relation between Optimal Mass Transportation (OMT) theory and convex geometry, and leads to a variational approach to solve the Alexandrov problem: constructing a convex polytope with prescribed face normals and volumes. By using the optimal transportation view of GAN model, we show that the discriminator computes the Wasserstein distance via the Kantorovich potential, the generator calculates the transportation map. For a large class of transportation costs, the Kantorovich potential can give the optimal transportation map by a close-form formula. Therefore, it is sufficient to solely optimize the discriminator. This shows the adversarial competition can be avoided, and the computational architecture can be simplified. Preliminary experimental results show the geometric method outperforms the traditional Wasserstein GAN for approximating probability measures with multiple clusters in low dimensional space.

This work proposes a novel metric based algorithm for quadrilateral mesh generating. Each quad-mesh induces a Riemannian metric satisfying special conditions: the metric is a flat metric with cone singularities conformal to the original metric, the total curvature satisfies the Gauss–Bonnet condition, the holonomy group is a subgroup of the rotation group $\{e^{ik\pi/2}\}$, there is cross field obtained by parallel translation which is aligned with the boundaries, and its streamlines are finite geodesics. Inversely, such kind of metric induces a quad-mesh. Based on discrete Ricci flow and conformal structure deformation, one can obtain a metric satisfying all the conditions and obtain the desired quad-mesh. This method is rigorous, simple and automatic. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the algorithm.

Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) is a special type of Voronoi diagram such that the generating point of each Voronoi cell is also its center of mass. The CVT has broad applications in computer graphics, such as meshing, stippling, sampling, etc. The existing methods for computing CVTs on meshes either require a global parameterization or compute it in the restricted sense (that is, intersecting a 3D CVT with the surface). Therefore, these approaches often fail on models with complicated geometry and/or topology. This paper presents two intrinsic algorithms for computing CVT on triangle meshes. The first algorithm adopts the Lloyd framework, which iteratively moves the generator of each geodesic Voronoi diagram to its mass center. Based on the discrete exponential map, our method can efficiently compute the Riemannian center and the center of mass for any geodesic Voronoi diagram. The second algorithm uses the L-BFGS method to accelerate the intrinsic CVT computation. Thanks to the intrinsic feature, our methods are independent of the embedding space, and work well for models with arbitrary topology and complicated geometry, where the existing extrinsic approaches often fail. The promising experimental results show the advantages of our method.

We report recent progress in the computation of conformal mappings from surfaces with arbitrary topologies to canonical domains. Two major computational methodologies are emphasized; one is holomorphic differentials based on Riemann surface theory and the other is surface Ricci flow from geometric analysis. The applications of surface conformal mapping in the field of engineering are briefly reviewed.

Manifold parameterizations have been applied to various fields of commercial industries. Several efficient algorithms for the computation of triangular surface mesh parameterizations have been proposed in recent years. However, the computation of tetrahedral volumetric mesh parameterizations is more challenging due to the fact that the number of mesh points would become enormously large when the higher resolution mesh is considered and the bijectivity of parameterizations is more difficult to guarantee. In this paper, we develop a novel volumetric stretch energy minimization algorithm for volume-preserving parameterizations of simply connected 3-manifolds with a single boundary under the restriction that the boundary is a spherical area-preserving mapping. In addition, our algorithm can also be applied to compute spherical angle- and area-preserving parameterizations of genus-zero closed surfaces, respectively. Several numerical experiments indicate that the developed algorithms are more efficient and reliable compared to other existing algorithms. Numerical results on applications of the manifold partition and the mesh processing for three-dimensional printing are demonstrated thereafter to show the robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Intrinsic Delaunay triangulation (IDT) naturally generalizes Delaunay triangulation from R^2 to curved surfaces. Due to many favorable properties, the IDT whose vertex set includes all mesh vertices is of particular interest in polygonal mesh processing. To date, the only way for constructing such IDT is the edge-flipping algorithm, which iteratively flips non-Delaunay edges to become locally Delaunay. Although this algorithm is conceptually simple and guarantees to terminate in finite steps, it has no known time complexity and may also produce triangulations containing faces with only two edges. This article develops a new method to obtain proper IDTs on manifold triangle meshes.We first compute a geodesic Voronoi diagram (GVD) by taking all mesh vertices as generators and then find its dual graph. The sufficient condition for the dual graph to be a proper triangulation is that all Voronoi cells satisfy the so-called closed ball property. To guarantee the closed ball property everywhere, a certain sampling criterion is required. For Voronoi cells that violate the closed ball property, we fix them by computing topologically safe regions, inwhich auxiliary sites can be addedwithout changing the topology of theVoronoi diagram beyond them.Given a meshwith n vertices, we prove that by adding at most O(n) auxiliary sites, the computed GVD satisfies the closed ball property, and hence its dual graph is a proper IDT. Our method has a theoretical worst-case time complexity O(n^2 + tn log n), where t is the number of obtuse angles in the mesh. Computational results show that it empirically runs in linear time on real-world models.

3D surface classification is a fundamental problem in computer vision and computational geometry. Surfaces can be classified by different transformation groups. Traditional classification methods mainly use topological transformation groups and Euclidean transformation groups. This paper introduces a novel method to classify surfaces by conformal transformation groups. Conformal equivalent class is refiner than topological equivalent class and coarser than isometric equivalent class, making it suitable for practical classification purposes. For general surfaces, the gradient fields of conformal maps form a vector space, which has a natural structure invariant under conformal transformations. We present an algorithm to compute this conformal structure, which can be represented as matrices, and use it to classify surfaces. The result is intrinsic to the geometry, invariant to triangulation and insensitive to resolution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to classify surfaces with arbitrary topologies by global conformal invariants. The method introduced here can also be used for surface matching problems.