Conformal Surface Morphing with Applications on Facial Expressions

Morphing is the process of changing one figure into another. Some numerical methods of 3D surface morphing by deformable modeling and conformal mapping are shown in this study. It is well known that there exists a unique Riemann conformal mapping from a simply connected surface into a unit disk by the Riemann mapping theorem. The dilation and relative orientations of the 3D surfaces can be linked through the M\"obius transformation due to the conformal characteristic of the Riemann mapping. On the other hand, a 3D surface deformable model can be built via various approaches such as mutual parameterization from direct interpolation or surface matching using landmarks. In this paper, we take the advantage of the unique representation of 3D surfaces by the mean curvatures and the conformal factors associated with the Riemann mapping. By registering the landmarks on the conformal parametric domains, the correspondence of the mean curvatures and the conformal factors for each surfaces can be obtained. As a result, we can construct the 3D deformation field from the surface reconstruction algorithm proposed by Gu and Yau. Furthermore, by composition of the M\"obius transformation and the 3D deformation field, the morphing sequence can be generated from the mean curvatures and the conformal factors on a unified mesh structure by using the cubic spline homotopy. Several numerical experiments of the face morphing are presented to demonstrate the robustness of our approach.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figure

Beltrami Representation and its applications to texture map and video compression

Surface parameterizations and registrations are important in computer graphics and imaging, where 1-1 correspondences between meshes are computed. In practice, surface maps are usually represented and stored as 3D coordinates each vertex is mapped to, which often requires lots of storage memory. This causes inconvenience in data transmission and data storage. To tackle this problem, we propose an effective algorithm for compressing surface homeomorphisms using Fourier approximation of the Beltrami representation. The Beltrami representation is a complex-valued function defined on triangular faces of the surface mesh with supreme norm strictly less than 1. Under suitable normalization, there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of surface homeomorphisms and the set of Beltrami representations. Hence, every bijective surface map is associated with a unique Beltrami representation. Conversely, given a Beltrami representation, the corresponding bijective surface map can be exactly reconstructed using the Linear Beltrami Solver introduced in this paper. Using the Beltrami representation, the surface homeomorphism can be easily compressed by Fourier approximation, without distorting the bijectivity of the map. The storage memory can be effectively reduced, which is useful for many practical problems in computer graphics and imaging. In this paper, we proposed to apply the algorithm to texture map compression and video compression. With our proposed algorithm, the storage requirement for the texture properties of a textured surface can be significantly reduced. Our algorithm can further be applied to compressing motion vector fields for video compression, which effectively improve the compression ratio.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figure

TEMPO: Feature-Endowed Teichm\"uller Extremal Mappings of Point Clouds

In recent decades, the use of 3D point clouds has been widespread in computer industry. The development of techniques in analyzing point clouds is increasingly important. In particular, mapping of point clouds has been a challenging problem. In this paper, we develop a discrete analogue of the Teichm\"{u}ller extremal mappings, which guarantee uniform conformality distortions, on point cloud surfaces. Based on the discrete analogue, we propose a novel method called TEMPO for computing Teichm\"{u}ller extremal mappings between feature-endowed point clouds. Using our proposed method, the Teichm\"{u}ller metric is introduced for evaluating the dissimilarity of point clouds. Consequently, our algorithm enables accurate recognition and classification of point clouds. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method

Teichm\"uller extremal mapping and its applications to landmark matching registration

Registration, which aims to find an optimal 1-1 correspondence between shapes, is an important process in different research areas. Conformal mappings have been widely used to obtain a diffeomorphism between shapes that minimizes angular distortion. Conformal registrations are beneficial since it preserves the local geometry well. However, when landmark constraints are enforced, conformal mappings generally do not exist. This motivates us to look for a unique landmark matching quasi-conformal registration, which minimizes the conformality distortion. Under suitable condition on the landmark constraints, a unique diffeomporphism, called the Teichm\"uller extremal mapping between two surfaces can be obtained, which minimizes the maximal conformality distortion. In this paper, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm, called the Quasi-conformal (QC) iterations, to compute the Teichm\"uller mapping. The basic idea is to represent the set of diffeomorphisms using Beltrami coefficients (BCs), and look for an optimal BC associated to the desired Teichm\"uller mapping. The associated diffeomorphism can be efficiently reconstructed from the optimal BC using the Linear Beltrami Solver(LBS). Using BCs to represent diffeomorphisms guarantees the diffeomorphic property of the registration. Using our proposed method, the Teichm\"uller mapping can be accurately and efficiently computed within 10 seconds. The obtained registration is guaranteed to be bijective. The proposed algorithm can also be extended to compute Teichm\"uller mapping with soft landmark constraints. We applied the proposed algorithm to real applications, such as brain landmark matching registration, constrained texture mapping and human face registration. Experimental results shows that our method is both effective and efficient in computing a non-overlap landmark matching registration with least amount of conformality distortion.Comment: 26 pages, 21 figure

QCMC: Quasi-conformal Parameterizations for Multiply-connected domains

This paper presents a method to compute the {\it quasi-conformal parameterization} (QCMC) for a multiply-connected 2D domain or surface. QCMC computes a quasi-conformal map from a multiply-connected domain $S$ onto a punctured disk $D_S$ associated with a given Beltrami differential. The Beltrami differential, which measures the conformality distortion, is a complex-valued function $\mu:S\to\mathbb{C}$ with supremum norm strictly less than 1. Every Beltrami differential gives a conformal structure of $S$. Hence, the conformal module of $D_S$, which are the radii and centers of the inner circles, can be fully determined by $\mu$, up to a M\"obius transformation. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to simultaneously search for the conformal module and the optimal quasi-conformal parameterization. The key idea is to minimize the Beltrami energy subject to the boundary constraints. The optimal solution is our desired quasi-conformal parameterization onto a punctured disk. The parameterization of the multiply-connected domain simplifies numerical computations and has important applications in various fields, such as in computer graphics and vision. Experiments have been carried out on synthetic data together with real multiply-connected Riemann surfaces. Results show that our proposed method can efficiently compute quasi-conformal parameterizations of multiply-connected domains and outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms. Applications of the proposed parameterization technique have also been explored.Comment: 26 pages, 23 figures, submitted. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.6908, arXiv:1307.2679 by other author

A Linear Formulation for Disk Conformal Parameterization of Simply-Connected Open Surfaces

Surface parameterization is widely used in computer graphics and geometry processing. It simplifies challenging tasks such as surface registrations, morphing, remeshing and texture mapping. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for computing the disk conformal parameterization of simply-connected open surfaces. A double covering technique is used to turn a simply-connected open surface into a genus-0 closed surface, and then a fast algorithm for parameterization of genus-0 closed surfaces can be applied. The symmetry of the double covered surface preserves the efficiency of the computation. A planar parameterization can then be obtained with the aid of a M\"obius transformation and the stereographic projection. After that, a normalization step is applied to guarantee the circular boundary. Finally, we achieve a bijective disk conformal parameterization by a composition of quasi-conformal mappings. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in the computational time by over 60%. At the same time, our proposed method retains comparable accuracy, bijectivity and robustness when compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. Applications to texture mapping are presented for illustrating the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm

Optimization of Surface Registrations using Beltrami Holomorphic Flow

In shape analysis, finding an optimal 1-1 correspondence between surfaces within a large class of admissible bijective mappings is of great importance. Such process is called surface registration. The difficulty lies in the fact that the space of all surface diffeomorphisms is a complicated functional space, making exhaustive search for the best mapping challenging. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple representation of bijective surface maps using Beltrami coefficients (BCs), which are complex-valued functions defined on surfaces with supreme norm less than 1. Fixing any 3 points on a pair of surfaces, there is a 1-1 correspondence between the set of surface diffeomorphisms between them and the set of BCs. Hence, every bijective surface map can be represented by a unique BC. Conversely, given a BC, we can reconstruct the unique surface map associated to it using the Beltrami Holomorphic flow (BHF) method. Using BCs to represent surface maps is advantageous because it is a much simpler functional space, which captures many essential features of a surface map. By adjusting BCs, we equivalently adjust surface diffeomorphisms to obtain the optimal map with desired properties. More specifically, BHF gives us the variation of the associated map under the variation of BC. Using this, a variational problem over the space of surface diffeomorphisms can be easily reformulated into a variational problem over the space of BCs. This makes the minimization procedure much easier. More importantly, the diffeomorphic property is always preserved. We test our method on synthetic examples and real medical applications. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm for surface registration

Densely tracking sequences of 3D face scans

3D face dense tracking aims to find dense inter-frame correspondences in a sequence of 3D face scans and constitutes a powerful tool for many face analysis tasks, e.g., 3D dynamic facial expression analysis. The majority of the existing methods just fit a 3D face surface or model to a 3D target surface without considering temporal information between frames. In this paper, we propose a novel method for densely tracking sequences of 3D face scans, which ex- tends the non-rigid ICP algorithm by adding a novel specific criterion for temporal information. A novel fitting framework is presented for automatically tracking a full sequence of 3D face scans. The results of experiments carried out on the BU4D-FE database are promising, showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for 3D face dense tracking.Comment: 8 page

A Conformal Approach for Surface Inpainting

We address the problem of surface inpainting, which aims to fill in holes or missing regions on a Riemann surface based on its surface geometry. In practical situation, surfaces obtained from range scanners often have holes where the 3D models are incomplete. In order to analyze the 3D shapes effectively, restoring the incomplete shape by filling in the surface holes is necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel conformal approach to inpaint surface holes on a Riemann surface based on its surface geometry. The basic idea is to represent the Riemann surface using its conformal factor and mean curvature. According to Riemann surface theory, a Riemann surface can be uniquely determined by its conformal factor and mean curvature up to a rigid motion. Given a Riemann surface $S$, its mean curvature $H$ and conformal factor $\lambda$ can be computed easily through its conformal parameterization. Conversely, given $\lambda$ and $H$, a Riemann surface can be uniquely reconstructed by solving the Gauss-Codazzi equation on the conformal parameter domain. Hence, the conformal factor and the mean curvature are two geometric quantities fully describing the surface. With this $\lambda$-$H$ representation of the surface, the problem of surface inpainting can be reduced to the problem of image inpainting of $\lambda$ and $H$ on the conformal parameter domain. Once $\lambda$ and $H$ are inpainted, a Riemann surface can be reconstructed which effectively restores the 3D surface with missing holes. Since the inpainting model is based on the geometric quantities $\lambda$ and $H$, the restored surface follows the surface geometric pattern. We test the proposed algorithm on synthetic data as well as real surface data. Experimental results show that our proposed method is an effective surface inpainting algorithm to fill in surface holes on an incomplete 3D models based their surface geometry.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure

LMap: Shape-Preserving Local Mappings for Biomedical Visualization

Visualization of medical organs and biological structures is a challenging task because of their complex geometry and the resultant occlusions. Global spherical and planar mapping techniques simplify the complex geometry and resolve the occlusions to aid in visualization. However, while resolving the occlusions these techniques do not preserve the geometric context, making them less suitable for mission-critical biomedical visualization tasks. In this paper, we present a shape-preserving local mapping technique for resolving occlusions locally while preserving the overall geometric context. More specifically, we present a novel visualization algorithm, LMap, for conformally parameterizing and deforming a selected local region-of-interest (ROI) on an arbitrary surface. The resultant shape-preserving local mappings help to visualize complex surfaces while preserving the overall geometric context. The algorithm is based on the robust and efficient extrinsic Ricci flow technique, and uses the dynamic Ricci flow algorithm to guarantee the existence of a local map for a selected ROI on an arbitrary surface. We show the effectiveness and efficacy of our method in three challenging use cases: (1) multimodal brain visualization, (2) optimal coverage of virtual colonoscopy centerline flythrough, and (3) molecular surface visualization.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 24(12): 3111-3122, 2018 (12 pages, 11 figures