Subdivision surface fitting to a dense mesh using ridges and umbilics

Fitting a sparse surface to approximate vast dense data is of interest for many applications: reverse engineering, recognition and compression, etc. The present work provides an approach to fit a Loop subdivision surface to a dense triangular mesh of arbitrary topology, whilst preserving and aligning the original features. The natural ridge-joined connectivity of umbilics and ridge-crossings is used as the connectivity of the control mesh for subdivision, so that the edges follow salient features on the surface. Furthermore, the chosen features and connectivity characterise the overall shape of the original mesh, since ridges capture extreme principal curvatures and ridges start and end at umbilics. A metric of Hausdorff distance including curvature vectors is proposed and implemented in a distance transform algorithm to construct the connectivity. Ridge-colour matching is introduced as a criterion for edge flipping to improve feature alignment. Several examples are provided to demonstrate the feature-preserving capability of the proposed approach

Dynamic remeshing and applications

Triangle meshes are a flexible and generally accepted boundary representation for complex geometric shapes. In addition to their geometric qualities such as for instance smoothness, feature sensitivity ,or topological simplicity, intrinsic qualities such as the shape of the triangles, their distribution on the surface and the connectivity is essential for many algorithms working on them. In this thesis we present a flexible and efficient remeshing framework that improves these "intrinsic\u27; properties while keeping the mesh geometrically close to the original surface. We use a particle system approach and combine it with an iterative remeshing process in order to trim the mesh towards the requirements imposed by different applications. The particle system approach distributes the vertices on the mesh with respect to a user-defined scalar-field, whereas the iterative remeshing is done by means of "Dynamic Meshes\u27;, a combination of local topological operators that lead to a good natured connectivity. A dynamic skeleton ensures that our approach is able to preserve surface features, which are particularly important for the visual quality of the mesh. None of the algorithms requires a global parameterization or patch layouting in a preprocessing step, but works with simple local parameterizations instead. In the second part of this work we will show how to apply this remeshing framework in several applications scenarios. In particular we will elaborate on interactive remeshing, dynamic, interactive multiresolution modeling, semiregular remeshing and mesh simplification and we will show how the users can adapt the involved algorithms in a way that the resulting mesh meets their personal requirements