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.

The medial axis is an important shape representation that finds a wide range of applications in shape analysis. For large-scale shapes of high resolution, a progressive medial axis representation that starts with the lowest resolution and gradually adds more details is desired. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust geometric algorithm that computes progressive medial axes of a large-scale planar shape. The key ingredient of our method is a novel structural analysis of merging medial axes of two planar shapes along a shared boundary. Our method is robust by separating the analysis of topological structure from numerical computation. Our method is also fast and we show that the time complexity of merging two medial axes is O(n log nv), where n is the number of total boundary generators, nv is strictly smaller than n and behaves as a small constant in all our experiments. Experiments on large-scale polygonal data and comparison with state-of-the-art methods show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Let $K/k$ be a finite Galois extension and $\pi = \fn{Gal}(K/k)$. An algebraic torus $T$ defined over $k$ is called a $\pi$-torus if $T\times_{\fn{Spec}(k)} \fn{Spec}(K)\simeq \bm{G}_{m,K}^n$ for some integer $n$. The set of all algebraic $\pi$-tori defined over $k$ under the stably birational equivalence forms a semigroup, denoted by $T(\pi)$. We will give a complete proof of the following theorem due to Endo and Miyata \cite{EM4}. Theorem. Let $\pi$ be a finite group. Then $T(\pi)\simeq C(\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi})$ where $\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi}$ is a maximal $\bm{Z}$-order in $\bm{Q}\pi$ containing $\bm{Z}\pi$ and $C(\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi})$ is the locally free class group of $\Omega_{\bm{Z}\pi}$, provided that $\pi$ is isomorphic to one of the following four types of groups : $C_n$ ($n$ is any positive integer), $D_m$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$), $C_{q^f}\times D_m$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$, $q$ is an odd prime number not dividing $m$, $f\ge 1$, and $(\bm{Z}/q^f\bm{Z})^{\times}=\langle \bar{p}\rangle$ for any prime divisor $p$ of $m$), $Q_{4m}$ ($m$ is any odd integer $\ge 3$, $p\equiv 3 \pmod{4}$ for any prime divisor $p$ of $m$).

Morphing is the process of changing a geometric model or an image into another. The process generally involves rigid body motions and non-rigid deformations. It is well known that there exists a unique conformal mapping from a simply connected surface into a unit disk by the Riemann mapping theorem. On the other hand, a 3D surface deformable model can be built via various approaches such as mutual parameterization from direct interpolation or surface matching using landmarks. In this paper, a numerical methods of 3D surface morphing based on deformable model and conformal mapping is demonstrated. We take the advantage of the unique representation of 3D surfaces by the mean curvatures $H$ and the conformal factors $\lambda$ associated with the Riemann mapping and build up the deformation model by consistently registering the landmarks on the conformal parametric domains. As a result, the correspondence of the $(H, \lambda)$ between two surfaces can be defined and a 3D deformation field can be reconstructed. Furthermore, by composition of the M\"obius transformation and the 3D deformation field, a smooth morphing sequence can be generated over a consistent mesh structure via the cubic spline homotopy. Several numerical experiments on the face morphing are presented to demonstrate the robustness of our approach.