For smooth compact oriented Riemannian manifolds$M$of dimension 4$k$+2,$k$≥0, with or without boundary, and a vector bundle$F$on$M$with an inner product and a flat connection, we construct a modification of the Hodge star operator on the middle-dimensional (parabolic) cohomology of$M$twisted by$F$. This operator induces a canonical complex structure on the middle-dimensional cohomology space that is compatible with the natural symplectic form given by integrating the wedge product. In particular, when$k$=0 we get a canonical almost complex structure on the non-singular part of the moduli space of flat connections on a Riemann surface, with monodromies along boundary components belonging to fixed conjugacy classes when the surface has boundary, that is compatible with the standard symplectic form on the moduli space.

Computing centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVT) has many applications in computer graphics. The existing methods, such as the Lloyd algorithm and the quasi-Newton solver, are efficient and easy to implement; however, they compute only the local optimal solutions due to the highly non-linear nature of the CVT energy. This paper presents a novel method, called manifold differential evolution (MDE), for computing globally optimal geodesic CVT energy on triangle meshes. Formulating the mutation operator using discrete geodesics, MDE naturally extends the powerful differential evolution framework from Euclidean spaces to manifold domains. Under mild assumptions, we show that MDE has a provable probabilistic convergence to the global optimum. Experiments on a wide range of 3D models show that MDE consistently outperforms the existing methods by producing results with lower energy. Thanks to its intrinsic and global nature, MDE is insensitive to initialization and mesh tessellation. Moreover, it is able to handle multiply-connected Voronoi cells, which are challenging to the existing geodesic CVT methods.

In the paper, we study the three-dimensional Prandtl equations, and prove that if one component of the tangential velocity field satisfies the monotonicity assumption in the normal direction, then the system is locally well-posed in the Gevrey function space with Gevrey index in ] 1, 2]. The proof relies on some new cancellation mechanism in the system in addition to those observed in the two-dimensional setting.

In this paper, we propose the generalized B divided difference, with which the $(k−1)$th derivative of B-spline curves of order $k$ can be obtained directly without the need to compute the first $(k−2)$ derivatives as before. Based on the generalized B divided difference, the necessary and sufficient condition for degree-reducible B-spline curves is presented. Algorithms for degree reduction of B-spline curves are proposed using the constrained optimization methods.

We propose a framework for global registration of building scans. The first contribution of our work is to detect and use portals (e.g. doors and windows) to improve the local registration between two scans. Our second contribution is an optimization based on a linear integer programming formulation. We abstract each scan as a block and model the block registration as an optimization problem that aims at maximizing the overall matching score of the entire scene. We propose an efficient solution to this optimization problem by iteratively detecting and adding local constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on buildings of various styles and we show that our approach is superior to the current state of the art.