372 research outputs found
Geodesic Paths On 3D Surfaces: Survey and Open Problems
This survey gives a brief overview of theoretically and practically relevant
algorithms to compute geodesic paths and distances on three-dimensional
surfaces. The survey focuses on polyhedral three-dimensional surfaces
VoroCrust: Voronoi Meshing Without Clipping
Polyhedral meshes are increasingly becoming an attractive option with
particular advantages over traditional meshes for certain applications. What
has been missing is a robust polyhedral meshing algorithm that can handle broad
classes of domains exhibiting arbitrarily curved boundaries and sharp features.
In addition, the power of primal-dual mesh pairs, exemplified by
Voronoi-Delaunay meshes, has been recognized as an important ingredient in
numerous formulations. The VoroCrust algorithm is the first provably-correct
algorithm for conforming polyhedral Voronoi meshing for non-convex and
non-manifold domains with guarantees on the quality of both surface and volume
elements. A robust refinement process estimates a suitable sizing field that
enables the careful placement of Voronoi seeds across the surface circumventing
the need for clipping and avoiding its many drawbacks. The algorithm has the
flexibility of filling the interior by either structured or random samples,
while preserving all sharp features in the output mesh. We demonstrate the
capabilities of the algorithm on a variety of models and compare against
state-of-the-art polyhedral meshing methods based on clipped Voronoi cells
establishing the clear advantage of VoroCrust output.Comment: 18 pages (including appendix), 18 figures. Version without compressed
images available on https://www.dropbox.com/s/qc6sot1gaujundy/VoroCrust.pdf.
Supplemental materials available on
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6p72h1e2ivw6kj3/VoroCrust_supplemental_materials.pd
Geodesics in Heat
We introduce the heat method for computing the shortest geodesic distance to
a specified subset (e.g., point or curve) of a given domain. The heat method is
robust, efficient, and simple to implement since it is based on solving a pair
of standard linear elliptic problems. The method represents a significant
breakthrough in the practical computation of distance on a wide variety of
geometric domains, since the resulting linear systems can be prefactored once
and subsequently solved in near-linear time. In practice, distance can be
updated via the heat method an order of magnitude faster than with
state-of-the-art methods while maintaining a comparable level of accuracy. We
provide numerical evidence that the method converges to the exact geodesic
distance in the limit of refinement; we also explore smoothed approximations of
distance suitable for applications where more regularity is required
Shortest Path Problems on a Polyhedral Surface
We develop algorithms to compute shortest path edge sequences, Voronoi diagrams, the Fréchet distance, and the diameter for a polyhedral surface
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