NRODUCTION LET y be a rectifiable Jordan curve in three-dimensional euclidean space. Answering an old question, whether y can bound a surface with minimal area, Douglas [l I] and Rad6 [45](independently) found a minimal surface spanning y which is parametrized by the disk. This minimal surface has minimal area among all Lipschitz maps from the disk into R3 which span y. The question whether this solution has branch points or not was finally settled by Osserman [42], who proved that there are no interior true branch points, and by Gulliver [lS], who proved that there are no interior false branch points.

Fundamental group is one of the most important topological invariants for general manifolds, which can be directly used as manifolds classification. In this work, we provide a series of practical and efficient algorithms to compute fundamental groups for general 3-manifolds based on CW cell decomposition. The input is a tetrahedral mesh, while the output is symbolic representation of its first fundamental group. We further simplify the fundamental group representation using computational algebraic method. We present the theoretical arguments of our algorithms, elaborate the algorithms with a number of examples, and give the analysis of their computational complexity.

We introduce a novel approach for the polygonization of Multi-view Stereo (MVS) meshes of buildings, which results in compact and topologically valid models. The main characteristic of our method is structure awareness, i.e., the recovery and preservation of the initial mesh primitives and their adjacencies. Our proposed methodology consists of three main stages: (a) primitive detection via mesh segmentation, (b) encoding of primitive adjacencies into a graph, and (c) polygonization. Polygonization is based on the approximation of the original mesh with a candidate set of planar polygonal faces. On this candidate set, we apply a binary labelling formulation to select and assemble an optimal set of faces under hard constraints that ensure that the final model is both manifold and watertight. Experiments on various building models demonstrate that our simplification method can produce simpler representations for both closed and open building meshes. Furthermore, these representations highly conform to the initial structure and are ready to be used for spatial analysis. The source code of this work is freely available at https://github.com/VasileiosBouzas/MeshPolygonization.