A Unified Surface Geometric Framework for Feature-Aware Denoising, Hole Filling and Context-Aware Completion

Technologies for 3D data acquisition and 3D printing have enormously developed in the past few years, and, consequently, the demand for 3D virtual twins of the original scanned objects has increased. In this context, feature-aware denoising, hole filling and context-aware completion are three essential (but far from trivial) tasks. In this work, they are integrated within a geometric framework and realized through a unified variational model aiming at recovering triangulated surfaces from scanned, damaged and possibly incomplete noisy observations. The underlying non-convex optimization problem incorporates two regularisation terms: a discrete approximation of the Willmore energy forcing local sphericity and suited for the recovery of rounded features, and an approximation of the l(0) pseudo-norm penalty favouring sparsity in the normal variation. The proposed numerical method solving the model is parameterization-free, avoids expensive implicit volumebased computations and based on the efficient use of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. Experiments show how the proposed framework can provide a robust and elegant solution suited for accurate restorations even in the presence of severe random noise and large damaged areas

Numerical Methods in Shape Spaces and Optimal Branching Patterns

The contribution of this thesis is twofold. The main part deals with numerical methods in the context of shape space analysis, where the shape space at hand is considered as a Riemannian manifold. In detail, we apply and extend the time-discrete geodesic calculus (established by Rumpf and Wirth [WBRS11, RW15]) to the space of discrete shells, i.e. triangular meshes with fixed connectivity. The essential building block is a variational time-discretization of geodesic curves, which is based on a local approximation of the squared Riemannian distance on the manifold. On physical shape spaces this approximation can be derived e.g. from a dissimilarity measure. The dissimilarity measure between two shell surfaces can naturally be defined as an elastic deformation energy capturing both membrane and bending distortions. Combined with a non-conforming discretization of a physically sound thin shell model the time-discrete geodesic calculus applied to the space of discrete shells is shown to be suitable to solve important problems in computer graphics and animation. To extend the existing calculus, we introduce a generalized spline functional based on the covariant derivative along a curve in shape space whose minimizers can be considered as Riemannian splines. We establish a corresponding time-discrete functional that fits perfectly into the framework of Rumpf and Wirth, and prove this discretization to be consistent. Several numerical simulations reveal that the optimization of the spline functional—subject to appropriate constraints—can be used to solve the multiple interpolation problem in shape space, e.g. to realize keyframe animation. Based on the spline functional, we further develop a simple regression model which generalizes linear regression to nonlinear shape spaces. Numerical examples based on real data from anatomy and botany show the capability of the model. Finally, we apply the statistical analysis of elastic shape spaces presented by Rumpf and Wirth [RW09, RW11] to the space of discrete shells. To this end, we compute a Fréchet mean within a class of shapes bearing highly nonlinear variations and perform a principal component analysis with respect to the metric induced by the Hessian of an elastic shell energy. The last part of this thesis deals with the optimization of microstructures arising e.g. at austenite-martensite interfaces in shape memory alloys. For a corresponding scalar problem, Kohn and Müller [KM92, KM94] proved existence of a minimizer and provided a lower and an upper bound for the optimal energy. To establish the upper bound, they studied a particular branching pattern generated by mixing two different martensite phases. We perform a finite element simulation based on subdivision surfaces that suggests a topologically different class of branching patterns to represent an optimal microstructure. Based on these observations we derive a novel, low dimensional family of patterns and show—numerically and analytically—that our new branching pattern results in a significantly better upper energy bound

Geometric Surface Processing and Virtual Modeling

In this work we focus on two main topics "Geometric Surface Processing" and "Virtual Modeling". The inspiration and coordination for most of the research work contained in the thesis has been driven by the project New Interactive and Innovative Technologies for CAD (NIIT4CAD), funded by the European Eurostars Programme. NIIT4CAD has the ambitious aim of overcoming the limitations of the traditional approach to surface modeling of current 3D CAD systems by introducing new methodologies and technologies based on subdivision surfaces in a new virtual modeling framework. These innovations will allow designers and engineers to transform quickly and intuitively an idea of shape in a high-quality geometrical model suited for engineering and manufacturing purposes. One of the objective of the thesis is indeed the reconstruction and modeling of surfaces, representing arbitrary topology objects, starting from 3D irregular curve networks acquired through an ad-hoc smart-pen device. The thesis is organized in two main parts: "Geometric Surface Processing" and "Virtual Modeling". During the development of the geometric pipeline in our Virtual Modeling system, we faced many challenges that captured our interest and opened new areas of research and experimentation. In the first part, we present these theories and some applications to Geometric Surface Processing. This allowed us to better formalize and give a broader understanding on some of the techniques used in our latest advancements on virtual modeling and surface reconstruction. The research on both topics led to important results that have been published and presented in articles and conferences of international relevance

Non-rigid registration of 2-D/3-D dynamic data with feature alignment

In this work, we are computing the matching between 2D manifolds and 3D manifolds with temporal constraints, that is we are computing the matching among a time sequence of 2D/3D manifolds. It is solved by mapping all the manifolds to a common domain, then build their matching by composing the forward mapping and the inverse mapping. At first, we solve the matching problem between 2D manifolds with temporal constraints by using mesh-based registration method. We propose a surface parameterization method to compute the mapping between the 2D manifold and the common 2D planar domain. We can compute the matching among the time sequence of deforming geometry data through this common domain. Compared with previous work, our method is independent of the quality of mesh elements and more efficient for the time sequence data. Then we develop a global intensity-based registration method to solve the matching problem between 3D manifolds with temporal constraints. Our method is based on a 4D(3D+T) free-from B-spline deformation model which has both spatial and temporal smoothness. Compared with previous 4D image registration techniques, our method avoids some local minimum. Thus it can be solved faster and achieve better accuracy of landmark point predication. We demonstrate the efficiency of these works on the real applications. The first one is applied to the dynamic face registering and texture mapping. The second one is applied to lung tumor motion tracking in the medical image analysis. In our future work, we are developing more efficient mesh-based 4D registration method. It can be applied to tumor motion estimation and tracking, which can be used to calculate the read dose delivered to the lung and surrounding tissues. Thus this can support the online treatment of lung cancer radiotherapy

Construction of C\u3csup\u3e∞\u3c/sup\u3e Surfaces From Triangular Meshes Using Parametric Pseudo-Manifolds

We present a new constructive solution for the problem of fitting a smooth surface to a given triangle mesh. Our construction is based on the manifold-based approach pioneered by Grimm and Hughes. The key idea behind this approach is to define a surface by overlapping surface patches via a gluing process, as opposed to stitching them together along their common boundary curves. The manifold based approach has proved to be well-suited to fit with relative ease, Ck-continuous parametric surfaces to triangle and quadrilateral meshes, for any arbitrary finite k or even k = ∞. Smooth surfaces generated by the manifold-based approach share some of the most important properties of splines surfaces, such as local shape control and fixed-sized local support for basis functions. In addition, the differential structure of a manifold provides us with a natural setting for solving equations on the surface boundary of 3D shapes. Our new manifold-based solution possesses most of the best features of previous constructions. In particular, our construction is simple, compact, powerful, and flexible in ways of defining the geometry of the resulting surface. Unlike some of the most recent manifold-based solutions, ours has been devised to work with triangle meshes. These meshes are far more popular than any other kind of mesh encountered in computer graphics and geometry processing applications. We also provide a mathematically sound theoretical framework to undergird our solution. This theoretical framework slightly improves upon the one given by Grimm and Hughes, which was used by most manifold-based constructions introduced before

Geometrically smooth spline bases for data fitting and simulation

International audienceGiven a topological complex $M$ with glueing data along edges shared by adjacent faces, we study the associated space of geometrically smooth spline functions that satisfy differentiability properties across shared edges. We present new and efficient constructions of basis functions of the space of $G^{1}$-spline functions on quadrangular meshes, which are tensor product b-spline functions on each quadrangle and with b-spline transition maps across the shared edges. This new strategy for constructing basis functions is based on a local analysis of the edge functions, and does not depend on the global topology of $M$. We show that the separability of the space of $G^{1}$ splines across an edge allows to determine the dimension and a basis of the space of $G^{1}$ splines on $M$.This leads to explicit and effective constructions of basis functions attached to the vertices, edges and faces of $M$.This basis construction has important applications in geometric modeling and simulation. We illustrate it by the fitting of point clouds by $G^{1}$ splines on quadrangular meshes of complex topology and in Isogeometric Analysis methods for the solution of diffusion equations. The ingredients are detailed and experimentation results showing the behavior of the method are presented