This paper presents a skeleton-based method for deforming meshes (the skeleton need not be the medial axis). The significant difference from previous skeleton-based methods is that the latter use the skeleton to control movement of vertices, whereas we use it to control the simplices defining the model. By doing so, errors that occur near joints in other methods can be spread over the whole mesh, via an optimization process, resulting in smooth transitions near joints of the skeleton. By controlling simplices, our method has the additional advantage that no vertex weights need be defined on the bones, which is a tedious requirement in previous skeleton-based methods. Furthermore, by incorporating the translation vector in our optimization, unlike other methods, we do not need to fix an arbitrary vertex, and the deformed mesh moves with the deformed skeleton. Our method can also easily be used to control deformation by moving a few chosen line segments, rather than a skeleton.

Mesh parameterization is a fundamental technique in computer graphics. The major goals during mesh parameterization are to minimize both the angle distortion and the area distortion. Angle distortion can be eliminated by the use of conformal mapping, in principle. Our paper focuses on solving the problem of finding the best discrete conformal mapping that also minimizes area distortion. First, we deduce an exact analytical differential formula to represent area distortion by curvature change in the discrete conformal mapping, giving a dynamic Poisson equation. On a mesh, the vertex curvature is related to edge lengths by the curvature map. Our result shows the map is invertible, i.e., the edge lengths can be computed from the curvature (by integration). Furthermore, we give the explicit Jacobi matrix of the inverse curvature map. Second, we formulate the task of computing conformal parameterizations with least area distortions as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem in curvature space. We deduce explicit conditions for the optima. Third, we give an energy form to measure the area distortions, and show that it has a unique global minimum. We use this to design an efficient algorithm, called free boundary curvature diffusion, which is guaranteed to converge to the global minimum; it has a natural physical interpretation. This result proves the common belief that optimal parameterization with least area distortion has a unique solution and can be achieved by free boundary conformal mapping. Major theoretical results and practical algorithms are presented for optimal parameterization based on the inverse curvature map. Comparisons are conducted with existing methods and using different energies. Novel parameterization applications are also introduced. The theoretical framework of the inverse curvature map can be applied to further study discrete conformal mappings.

3D models are now widely available for use in various applications. The demand for automatic model analysis and understanding is ever increasing. Model segmentation is an important step towards model understanding, and acts as a useful tool for different model processing applications, e.g. reverse engineering and modeling by example. We extend a random walk method used previously for image segmentation to give algorithms for both interactive and automatic model segmentation. This method is extremely efficient, and scales almost linearly with the number of faces, and the number of regions. For models of moderate size, interactive performance is achieved with commodity PCs. We demonstrate that this method can be applied to both triangle meshes and point cloud data. It is easy to implement, robust to noise in the model, and yields results suitable for downstream applications for both graphical and engineering models.

In this report, we propose a new semi-fragile watermarking algorithm for the authentication of 3D models based on integral invariants. To do so, we embed a watermark image by modifying the integral invariants of some of the vertices. Basically, we shift a vertex and its neighbors in order to change the integral invariants. To extract the watermark, test all the vertices for the embedded information, and combine them to recover the watermark image. How many parts can the watermark image be recovered would help us to make the authentication decision. Experimental test shows that this method is robust against rigid transform and noise attack, and useful to test purposely attack besides transferring noise and geometrical transforming noise. An additional contribution of this paper is a new algorithm for computing two kinds of integral invariants.

In this paper we present a new algorithm which turns an unstructured triangle mesh into a quad dominant mesh with edges well aligned to the principal directions of the underlying surface. Instead of computing a globally smooth parameterization or integrating curvature lines along a tangent vector field, we simply apply an iterative relaxation scheme which incrementally aligns the mesh edges to the principal directions. We further obtain the quad dominant mesh by dropping the not-aligned diagonal edges from the triangle mesh. A post-processing stage is introduced to further improve the results. The major advantage of our algorithm is its conceptual simplicity since it is merely based on elementary mesh operations such as edge collapse, flip, and split. Various results are presented in the paper; they show a good alignment to surface features and rather uniform distribution of mesh vertices. This makes them well suited, e.g., as CatmullClark Subdivision control meshes.

Surface Ricci flow is a powerful tool to design Riemannian metrics by user defined curvatures. Discrete surface Ricci flow has been broadly applied for surface parameterization, shape analysis, and computational topology. Conventional discrete Ricci flow has limitations. For meshes with low quality triangulations, if high conformality is required, the flow may get stuck at the local optimum of the Ricci energy. If convergence to the global optimum is enforced, the conformality may be sacrificed. This work introduces a novel method to generalize the traditional discrete Ricci flow. The generalized Ricci flow is more flexible, more robust and conformal for meshes with low quality triangulations. Conventional method is based on circle packing, which requires two circles on an edge intersect each other at an acute angle. Generalized method allows the two circles either intersect or separate from each other. This greatly improves the flexibility and robustness of the method. Furthermore, the generalized Ricci flow preserves the convexity of the Ricci energy, this ensures the uniqueness of the global optimum. Therefore the algorithm won't get stuck at the local optimum. Generalized discrete Ricci flow algorithms are explained in details for triangle meshes with both Euclidean and hyperbolic background geometries. Its advantages are demonstrated by theoretic proofs and practical applications in graphics, especially surface parameterization.

Watermarking algorithms provide a way of hiding or embedding some bits of information in a watermark. In the case of watermarking a 3D model, many algorithms employ a so-called indexed localization scheme. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework with two new steps for such watermarking algorithms to improve their capacity and invisibility. The first step is to find an optimal layout of invariant units to improve capacity. The second step is to rearrange the correspondence between the watermark units and the invariant units to improve invisibility. Experimental tests show that by using this framework, the capacity and invisibility of watermarking algorithms can be greatly improved.

This work introduces a rigorous and practical approach for automatic N-RoSy field design on arbitrary surfaces with user defined field topologies. The user has full control of the number, positions and indices of the singularities, the turning numbers of the loops, and is able to edit the field interactively. We formulate N-RoSy field construction as designing a Riemannian metric, such that the holonomy along any loop is compatible with the local symmetry of N-RoSy fields. We prove the compatibility condition using discrete parallel transport. The complexity of N-RoSy field design is caused by curvatures. In our work, we propose to simplify the Riemannian metric to make it flat almost everywhere. This approach greatly simplifies the process and improves the flexibility, such that, it can design N-RoSy fields with single singularity, and mixed-RoSy fields. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we apply our design system to pen-and-ink sketching and geometry remeshing.

Automatically discovering high-level facade structures in unorganized 3D point clouds of urban scenes is crucial for applications like digitalization of real cities. However, this problem is challenging due to poor-quality input data, contaminated with severe missing areas, noise and outliers. This work introduces the concept of adaptive partitioning to automatically derive a flexible and hierarchical representation of 3D urban facades. Our key observation is that urban facades are largely governed by concatenated and/or interlaced grids. Hence, unlike previous automatic facade analysis works which are typically restricted to globally rectilinear grids, we propose to automatically partition the facade in an adaptive manner, in which the splitting direction, the number and location of splitting planes are all adaptively determined. Such an adaptive partition operation is performed recursively to generate a hierarchical representation of the facade. We show that the concept of adaptive partitioning is also applicable to flexible and robust analysis of image facades. We evaluate our method on a dozen of LiDAR scans of various complexity and styles, and the image facades from the eTRIMS database and the Ecole Centrale Paris database. A series of applications that benefit from our approach are also demonstrated.

This work presents a technique that allows quick conversion of acquired low-quality data from consumer-level scanning devices to high-quality 3D models with labeled semantic parts and meanwhile their assembly reasonably close to the underlying geometry. This is achieved by a novel structure recovery approach that is essentially local to global and bottom up, enabling the creation of new structures by assembling existing labeled parts with respect to the acquired data. We demonstrate that using only a small-scale shape repository, our part assembly approach is able to faithfully recover a variety of high-level structures from only a single-view scan of man-made objects acquired by the Kinect system, containing a highly noisy, incomplete 3D point cloud and a corresponding RGB image.