Surface registration plays a fundamental role in many applications in computer vision and aims at finding a oneto-one correspondence between surfaces. Conformal mapping based surface registration methods conformally map 2D/3D surfaces onto 2D canonical domains and perform the matching on the 2D plane. This registration framework reduces dimensionality, and the result is intrinsic to Riemannian metric and invariant under isometric deformation. However, conformal mapping will be affected by inconsistent boundaries and non-isometric deformations of surfaces. In this work, we quantify the effects of boundary variation and non-isometric deformation to conformal mappings, and give the theoretical upper bounds for the distortions of conformal mappings under these two factors. Besides giving the thorough theoretical proofs of the theorems, we verified them by concrete experiments using 3D human facial scans with dynamic expressions and varying boundaries. Furthermore, we used the distortion estimates for reducing search range in feature matching of surface registration applications. The experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions and also demonstrate the performance improvements in feature tracking.

The seek for a new universal formulation for describing various non-equilibrium processes is a central task of modern non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In this paper, a novel steady-state thermodynamic formalism was established for general Markov processes described by the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation. Furthermore, corresponding formalisms of steady-state thermodynamics for master equation and Fokker-Planck equation could be rigorously derived in mathematics. To be concrete, we proved that: 1) in the limit of continuous time, the steady-state thermodynamic formalism for the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation fully agrees with that for the master equation; 2) a similar one-to-one correspondence could be established rigorously between the master equation and Fokker-Planck equation in the limit of large system size; 3) when a Markov process is restrained to one-step jump, the steady-state thermodynamic formalism for the Fokker-Planck equation with discrete state variables also goes to that for master equations, as the discretization step gets smaller and smaller. Our analysis indicated that, with respect to the steady state, general Markov processes admit a unified and self-consistent non-equilibrium thermodynamic formulation, regardless of underlying detailed models.

For a linear isometry T: C 0 (X) C 0 (Y) of finite corank, there is a cofinite subset Y 1 of Y such that Tf| Y 1= h f is a weighted composition operator and X is homeomorphic to a quotient space of Y 1 modulo a finite subset. When X= Y, such a T is called an isometric quasi-n-shift on C 0 (X). In this case, the action of T can be implemented as a shift on a tree-like structure, called a T-tree, in M (X) with exactly n joints. The T-tree is total in M (X) when T is a shift. With these tools, we can analyze the structure of T.

In this paper, a degree theory for finite dimensional generalized variational inequalities is built and employed to prove some results on solution existence and solution stability.

Degree theory has been developed as a tool for checking the solution existence of nonlinear equations. In his classic paper published in 1983, Browder developed a degree theory for mappings of monotone type f+ T, where f is a mapping of class (S)+ from a bounded open set in a reflexive Banach space X into its dual X, and T is a maximal monotone mapping from X into X. This breakthrough paved the way for many applications of degree theoretic techniques to several large classes of nonlinear partial differential equations. In this paper we continue to develop the results of Browder on the degree theory for mappings of monotone type f+ T. By enlarging the class of maximal monotone mappings and pseudo-monotone homotopies we obtain some new results of the degree theory for such mappings.