Finding correspondences between two surfaces is a fundamental operation in various applications in computer graphics and related fields. Candidate correspondences can be found by matching local signatures, but as they only consider local geometry, many are globally inconsistent. We provide a novel algorithm to prune a set of candidate correspondences to those most likely to be globally consistent. Our approach can handle articulated surfaces, and ones related by a deformation which is globally non-isometric, provided that the deformation is locally approximately isometric. Our approach uses an efficient diffusion framework, and only requires geodesic distance calculations in small neighbourhoods, unlike many existing techniques which require computation of global geodesic distances. We demonstrate that, for typical examples, our approach provides significant improvements in accuracy, yet also reduces time and memory costs by a factor of several hundred compared to existing pruning techniques. Our method is furthermore insensitive to holes, unlike many other methods.

Harmonic functions are the critical points of a Dirichlet energy functional, the linear projections of conformal maps. They play an important role in computer graphics, particularly for gradient-domain image processing and shape-preserving geometric computation. We propose Poisson coordinates, a novel transfinite interpolation scheme based on the Poisson integral formula, as a rapid way to estimate a harmonic function on a certain domain with desired boundary values. Poisson coordinates are an extension of the Mean Value coordinates (MVCs) which inherit their linear precision, smoothness, and kernel positivity. We give explicit formulae for Poisson coordinates in both continuous and 2D discrete forms. Superior to MVCs, Poisson coordinates are proved to be pseudoharmonic (i.e., they reproduce harmonic functions on n-dimensional balls). Our experimental results show that Poisson coordinates have lower Dirichlet energies than MVCs on a number of typical 2D domains (particularly convex domains). As well as presenting a formula, our approach provides useful insights for further studies on coordinates-based interpolation and fast estimation of harmonic functions.

In this report, we propose a new semi-fragile watermarking algorithm for the authentication of 3D models based on integral invariants. To do so, we embed a watermark image by modifying the integral invariants of some of the vertices. Basically, we shift a vertex and its neighbors in order to change the integral invariants. To extract the watermark, test all the vertices for the embedded information, and combine them to recover the watermark image. How many parts can the watermark image be recovered would help us to make the authentication decision. Experimental test shows that this method is robust against rigid transform and noise attack, and useful to test purposely attack besides transferring noise and geometrical transforming noise. An additional contribution of this paper is a new algorithm for computing two kinds of integral invariants.

This paper presents a skeleton-based method for deforming meshes (the skeleton need not be the medial axis). The significant difference from previous skeleton-based methods is that the latter use the skeleton to control movement of vertices, whereas we use it to control the simplices defining the model. By doing so, errors that occur near joints in other methods can be spread over the whole mesh, via an optimization process, resulting in smooth transitions near joints of the skeleton. By controlling simplices, our method has the additional advantage that no vertex weights need be defined on the bones, which is a tedious requirement in previous skeleton-based methods. Furthermore, by incorporating the translation vector in our optimization, unlike other methods, we do not need to fix an arbitrary vertex, and the deformed mesh moves with the deformed skeleton. Our method can also easily be used to control deformation by moving a few chosen line segments, rather than a skeleton.

Image matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. One of the well-known techniques is SIFT (scale-invariant feature transform). SIFT searches for and extracts robust features in hierarchical image scale spaces for object identification. However it often lacks efficiency as it identifies many insignificant features such as tree leaves and grass tips in a natural building image. We introduce a content adaptive image matching approach by preprocessing the image with a color-entropy based segmentation and harmonic inpainting. Natural structures such as tree leaves have both high entropy and distinguished color, and so such a combined measure can be both discriminative and robust. The harmonic inpainting smoothly interpolates the image functions over the tree regions and so blurrs and reduces the features and their unnecessary matching there. Numerical experiments on building images show