METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANALYSIS. 2000 International Press Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 591-604, September 2000 012

Surface segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer graphics. It has various applications such as metamorphosis, surface matching, surface compression, 3D shape retrieval, texture mapping, etc. All orientable surfaces are Riemann surfaces, and admit conformal structures. This paper introduces a novel surface segmentation algorithm based on its conformal structure. Each segment can be conformally mapped to a planar rectangle, and the transition maps are planar translations. The segmentation is intrinsic to the surface, independent of the embedding, and consistent for surfaces with similar geometries. By using segmentation based on conformal structure, the mapping between surfaces with arbitrary topologies can be constructed explicitly. The method is rigorous, efficient and automatic. The segmentation can be applied to surface morphing, construct conformal geometry image, convert mesh to Spline

A multilevel quality-guided phase unwrapping algorithm for real-time 3D shape measurement is presented. The quality map is generated from the gradient of the phase map. Multilevel thresholds are used to unwrap the phase level by level. Within the data points in each level, a fast scan-line algorithm is employed. The processing time of this algorithm is approximately 18.3 ms for an image size of 640480 pixels in an ordinary computer. We demonstrate that this algorithm can be implemented into our real-time 3D shape measurement system for real-time 3D reconstruction. Experiments show that this algorithm improves the previous scan-line phase unwrapping algorithm significantly although it reduces its processing speed slightly.

We propose a computational framework named iterative local adaptive majorize-minimization (I-LAMM) to simultaneously control algorithmic complexity and statistical error when fitting high dimensional models. I-LAMM is a two-stage algorithmic implementation of the local linear approximation to a family of folded concave penalized quasi-likelihood. The first stage solves a convex program with a crude precision tolerance to obtain a coarse initial estimator, which is further refined in the second stage by iteratively solving a sequence of convex programs with smaller precision tolerances. Theoretically, we establish a phase transition: the first stage has a sublinear iteration complexity, while the second stage achieves an improved linear rate of convergence. Though this framework is completely algorithmic, it provides solutions with optimal statistical performances and controlled algorithmic complexity for a large family

We propose a numerically efficient algorithm for simulating the multi-color optical self-focusing phenomena in nematic liquid crystals. The propagation of the nematicon is modeled by a parabolic wave equation coupled with a nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation governing the angle between the crystal and the direction of propagation. Numerically, the paraxial parabolic wave equation is solved by a fast Huygens sweeping method, while the nonlinear elliptic PDE is handled by the alternating direction explicit (ADE) method. The overall algorithm is shown to be numerically efficient for computing high frequency beam propagations.