VOLMAP: a Large Scale Benchmark for Volume Mappings to Simple Base Domains

Correspondences between geometric domains (mappings) are ubiquitous in computer graphics and engineering, both for a variety of downstream applications and as core building blocks for higher level algorithms. In particular, mapping a shape to a convex or star-shaped domain with simple geometry is a fundamental module in existing pipelines for mesh generation, solid texturing, generation of shape correspondences, advanced manufacturing etc. For the case of surfaces, computing such a mapping with guarantees of injectivity is a solved problem. Conversely, robust algorithms for the generation of injective volume mappings to simple polytopes are yet to be found, making this a fundamental open problem in volume mesh processing. VOLMAP is a large scale benchmark aimed to support ongoing research in volume mapping algorithms. The dataset contains 4.7K tetrahedral meshes, whose boundary vertices are mapped to a variety of simple domains, either convex or star-shaped. This data constitutes the input for candidate algorithms, which are then required to position interior vertices in the domain to obtain a volume map. Overall, this yields more than 22K alternative test cases. VOLMAP also comprises tools to process this data, analyze the resulting maps, and extend the dataset with new meshes, boundary maps and base domains. This article provides a brief overview of the field, discussing its importance and the lack of effective techniques. We then introduce both the dataset and its major features. An example of comparative analysis between two existing methods is also present

Unwind: Interactive Fish Straightening

The ScanAllFish project is a large-scale effort to scan all the world's 33,100 known species of fishes. It has already generated thousands of volumetric CT scans of fish species which are available on open access platforms such as the Open Science Framework. To achieve a scanning rate required for a project of this magnitude, many specimens are grouped together into a single tube and scanned all at once. The resulting data contain many fish which are often bent and twisted to fit into the scanner. Our system, Unwind, is a novel interactive visualization and processing tool which extracts, unbends, and untwists volumetric images of fish with minimal user interaction. Our approach enables scientists to interactively unwarp these volumes to remove the undesired torque and bending using a piecewise-linear skeleton extracted by averaging isosurfaces of a harmonic function connecting the head and tail of each fish. The result is a volumetric dataset of a individual, straight fish in a canonical pose defined by the marine biologist expert user. We have developed Unwind in collaboration with a team of marine biologists: Our system has been deployed in their labs, and is presently being used for dataset construction, biomechanical analysis, and the generation of figures for scientific publication

Bijective Parameterization with Free Boundaries

When displaying 3D surfaces onto computer screens, additional information is often mapped onto the surface to enhance the quality of the rendering. Surface parameterization generates a correspondence, or mapping, between the 3D surface and 2D parameterization space. This mapping has many applications in computer graphics, but in most cases cannot be performed without introducing large distortions in the 2D parameterization. Along with problems of distortion, the mapping of the 2D space to 3D for many applications can be invalidated if the property of bijectivity is violated. While there is previous research guaranteeing bijectivity, these methods must constrain or modify the boundary of the 2D parameterization. This dissertation, describes a fully automatic method for generating guaranteed bijective surface parameterizations from triangulated 3D surfaces. In particular, a new isometric distortion energy metric is introduced preventing local folds of triangles in the parameterization as well as a barrier function that prevents intersection of the 2D boundaries. By using a computationally efficient isometric metric energy, the dissertation achieves fast and comparable optimization times to previous methods. The boundary of the parameterization is free to change shape during the optimization to minimize distortion. A new optimization approach is introduced called singularity aware optimization and in conjunction with an interior point approach and barrier energy functions guarantee bijectivity. This optimization framework is then modified to allow for an importance weighting allowing for customizable and more efficient texel usage

Large-scale Geometric Data Decomposition, Processing and Structured Mesh Generation

Mesh generation is a fundamental and critical problem in geometric data modeling and processing. In most scientific and engineering tasks that involve numerical computations and simulations on 2D/3D regions or on curved geometric objects, discretizing or approximating the geometric data using a polygonal or polyhedral meshes is always the first step of the procedure. The quality of this tessellation often dictates the subsequent computation accuracy, efficiency, and numerical stability. When compared with unstructured meshes, the structured meshes are favored in many scientific/engineering tasks due to their good properties. However, generating high-quality structured mesh remains challenging, especially for complex or large-scale geometric data. In industrial Computer-aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) pipelines, the geometry processing to create a desirable structural mesh of the complex model is the most costly step. This step is semi-manual, and often takes up to several weeks to finish. Several technical challenges remains unsolved in existing structured mesh generation techniques. This dissertation studies the effective generation of structural mesh on large and complex geometric data. We study a general geometric computation paradigm to solve this problem via model partitioning and divide-and-conquer. To apply effective divide-and-conquer, we study two key technical components: the shape decomposition in the divide stage, and the structured meshing in the conquer stage. We test our algorithm on vairous data set, the results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework. The comparisons also show our algorithm outperforms existing partitioning methods in final meshing quality. We also show our pipeline scales up efficiently on HPC environment