Surface parameterizations have been widely applied in the computer-aided design for the geometric processing tasks of surface registration, remeshing, texture mapping, and so on. In this paper, we present an efficient balanced energy minimization (BEM) algorithm for the computation of simply connected open surface parameterizations with balanced angle and area distortions. The existence of a nontrivial accumulation function of the BEM algorithm is guaranteed under some mild conditions and the limiting function is shown to be one-to-one. Comparisons of the BEM algorithm with the angle- and the area-preserving parameterizations show that the angular distortion is close to that of the angle-preserving parameterization while the area distortion is significantly improved. An application of the BEM on the Chinese virtual broadcasting technique is demonstrated thereafter, which is consisted of surface remeshing, registration, and morphing.

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.

Surface conformal parameterizations have been widely applied to various tasks in computer graphics. In this paper, we develop a convergent conformal energy minimization (CCEM) iterative algorithm via the line-search gradient descent method with a quadratic approximation for the computation of disk-shaped conformal parameterizations of simply connected open triangular meshes. In addition, we prove the global convergence of the proposed CCEM iterative algorithm. Moreover, under some mild assumptions, we prove the existence of the nontrivial solution, which is a local minimum of the conformal energy with a bijective boundary map. Numerical experiments indicate that the efficiency of the proposed CCEM algorithm is highly improved and the accuracy is competitive with that of state-of-the-art algorithms.

Planar polynomial curves have rational offset curves, if they are either Pythagorean-hodograph (PH) or indirect Pythagorean-hodograph (iPH) curves. In this paper, we derive an algebraic and two geometric characterizations for planar quartic iPH curves. The characterizations are given in terms of quantities related to the Bézier control polygon of the curve, and naturally extend to quartic and cubic PH and quadratic iPH curves.

Shape analysis is a central problem in the field of computer vision. In 2D shape analysis, classification and recognition of objects from their observed silhouettes are extremely crucial but difficult. It usually involves an efficient representation of 2D shape space with a metric, so that its mathematical structure can be used for further analysis. Although the study of 2D simply-connected shapes has been subject to a corpus of literatures, the analysis of multiply-connected shapes is comparatively less studied. In this work, we propose a representation for general 2D multiply-connected domains with arbitrary topologies using conformal welding. A metric can be defined on the proposed representation space, which gives a metric to measure dissimilarities between objects. The main idea is to map the exterior and interior of the domain conformally to unit disks and circle domains (unit disk with several inner disks removed), using holomorphic 1-forms. A set of diffeomorphisms of the unit circle S1 can be obtained, which together with the conformal modules are used to define the shape signature. A shape distance between shape signatures can be defined to measure dissimilarities between shapes. We prove theoretically that the proposed shape signature uniquely determines the multiply-connected objects under suitable normalization. We also introduce a reconstruction algorithm to obtain shapes from their signatures. This completes our framework and allows us to move back and forth between shapes and signatures. With that, a morphing algorithm between shapes can be developed through the interpolation of the Beltrami coefficients associated with the signatures. Experiments have been carried out on shapes extracted from real images. Results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm as a stable shape representation scheme.