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.

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.

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.

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.

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.