The skeleton of a 2D shape is an important geometric structure in pattern analysis and computer vision. In this paper we study the skeleton of a 2D shape in a two-manifold M, based on a geodesic metric. We present a formal definition of the skeleton S(\Omega) for a shape V in M and show several properties that make S(\Omega) distinct from its Euclidean counterpart in R^2. We further prove that for a shape sequence {\Omega_i} that converge to a shape V in M, the mapping \Omega\rightarrow S(\Omega_i) is lower semi-continuous. A direct application of this result is that we can use a set P of sample points to approximate the boundary of a 2D shape V in M, and the Voronoi diagram of P inside \Omega\subset M gives a good approximation to the skeleton S(\Omega). Examples of skeleton computation in topography and brain morphometry are illustrated.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to extract feature landmarks on the vestibular system (VS), for the analysis of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) disease. AIS is a 3-D spinal deformity commonly occurred in adolescent girls with unclear etiology. One popular hypothesis was suggested to be the structural changes in the VS that induce the disturbed balance perception, and further cause the spinal deformity. The morphometry of VS to study the geometric differences between the healthy and AIS groups is of utmost importance. However, the VS is a genus-3 structure situated in the inner ear. The high-genus topology of the surface poses great challenge for shape analysis. In this work, we present a new method to compute exact geodesic loops on the VS. The resultant geodesic loops are in Euclidean metric, thus characterizing the intrinsic geometric properties of the VS based on the real background geometry. This leads to more accurate results than existing methods, such as the hyperbolic Ricci flow method. Furthermore, our method is fully automatic and highly efficient, e.g., one order of magnitude faster than. We applied our algorithm to the VS of normal and AIS subjects. The promising experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method and reveal more statistically significant shape difference in the VS between right-thoracic AIS and normal subjects.

We propose a method to map a multiply connected bounded planar region conformally to a bounded region with circular boundaries. The norm of the derivative of such a conformal map satisfies the Laplace equation with a nonlinear Neumann type boundary condition. We analyze the singular behavior at corners of the boundary and separate the major singular part. The remaining smooth part solves a variational problem which is easy to discretize. We use a finite element method and a gradient descent method to find an approximate solution. The conformal map is then constructed from this norm function. We tested our algorithm on a polygonal region and a curvilinear smooth region.

Texture mapping and texture synthesis are two popular methods for the decoration of surfaces with visual detail. Here, an existing challenge is to preserve, or at least balance, two competing metrics: scale and angle. In this paper we present two methods for this, both based on global conformal parameterization. First, we describe a texture synthesis algorithm for surfaces with arbitrary topology. By using the conformal parameterization, the 3D surface texture synthesis problem can be converted to a 2D image synthesis problem, which is more intuitive, easier, and conceptually simpler. While the conformality of the parameterization naturally preserves the angles of the texture, in this paper we provide a multi-scale technique to also maintain a more uniform area scaling factor. A second novel contribution is to employ the global parameterization to simultaneously preserve orthogonality and size in texture

We study the combinatorial complexity of Voronoi diagram of point sites on a general triangulated 2-manifold surface, based on the geodesic metric. Given a triangulated 2- manifold T of n faces and a set of m point sites S = {s1, s2, . . . , sm} ∈ T, we prove that the complexity of Voronoi diagram VT (S) of S on T is O(mn) if the genus of T is zero. For a genus-g manifold T in which the samples in S are dense enough and the resulting Voronoi diagram satisfies the closed ball property, we prove that the complexity of Voronoi diagram VT (S) is O((m + g)n).