We use adiabatic limits to study foliated manifolds. The Bott connection naturally shows up as the adiabatic limit of Levi-Civita connections. As an application, we then construct certain natural elliptic operators associated to the foliation and present a direct geometric proof of a vanshing theorem of Connes [Co], which extends the Lichnerowicz vanishing theorem [L] to foliated manifolds with spin leaves, for what we call almost Riemannian foliations. Several new vanishing theorems are also proved by using our method.

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The medial axis transform (MAT) is an important shape representation for shape approximation, shape recognition, and shape retrieval. Despite years of research, there is still a lack of effective methods for efficient, robust and accurate computation of the MAT. We present an efficient method, called {\em Q-MAT}, that uses quadratic error minimization to compute a structurally simple, geometrically accurate, and compact representation of the MAT. We introduce a new error metric for approximation and a new quantitative characterization of unstable branches of the MAT, and integrate them in an extension of the well-known quadric error metric (QEM) framework for mesh decimation. Q-MAT is fast, removes insignificant unstable branches effectively, and produces a simple and accurate piecewise linear approximation of the MAT. The method is thoroughly validated and compared with existing methods for MAT computation.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!