On the expected number of perfect matchings in cubic planar graphs

A well-known conjecture by Lov\'asz and Plummer from the 1970s asserted that a bridgeless cubic graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. It was solved in the affirmative by Esperet et al. (Adv. Math. 2011). On the other hand, Chudnovsky and Seymour (Combinatorica 2012) proved the conjecture in the special case of cubic planar graphs. In our work we consider random bridgeless cubic planar graphs with the uniform distribution on graphs with $n$ vertices. Under this model we show that the expected number of perfect matchings in labeled bridgeless cubic planar graphs is asymptotically $c\gamma^n$, where $c>0$ and $\gamma \sim 1.14196$ is an explicit algebraic number. We also compute the expected number of perfect matchings in (non necessarily bridgeless) cubic planar graphs and provide lower bounds for unlabeled graphs. Our starting point is a correspondence between counting perfect matchings in rooted cubic planar maps and the partition function of the Ising model in rooted triangulations.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Semi-Global Stereo Matching with Surface Orientation Priors

Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely-used efficient stereo matching technique. It works well for textured scenes, but fails on untextured slanted surfaces due to its fronto-parallel smoothness assumption. To remedy this problem, we propose a simple extension, termed SGM-P, to utilize precomputed surface orientation priors. Such priors favor different surface slants in different 2D image regions or 3D scene regions and can be derived in various ways. In this paper we evaluate plane orientation priors derived from stereo matching at a coarser resolution and show that such priors can yield significant performance gains for difficult weakly-textured scenes. We also explore surface normal priors derived from Manhattan-world assumptions, and we analyze the potential performance gains using oracle priors derived from ground-truth data. SGM-P only adds a minor computational overhead to SGM and is an attractive alternative to more complex methods employing higher-order smoothness terms.Comment: extended draft of 3DV 2017 (spotlight) pape

Discrete Dirac operators on Riemann surfaces and Kasteleyn matrices

Let S be a flat surface of genus g with cone type singularities. Given a bipartite graph G isoradially embedded in S, we define discrete analogs of the 2^{2g} Dirac operators on S. These discrete objects are then shown to converge to the continuous ones, in some appropriate sense. Finally, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the pair (S,G) for these discrete Dirac operators to be Kasteleyn matrices of the graph G. As a consequence, if these conditions are met, the partition function of the dimer model on G can be explicitly written as an alternating sum of the determinants of these 2^{2g} discrete Dirac operators.Comment: 39 pages, minor change

The enumeration of generalized Tamari intervals

Let $v$ be a grid path made of north and east steps. The lattice $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$, based on all grid paths weakly above $v$ and sharing the same endpoints as $v$, was introduced by Pr\'eville-Ratelle and Viennot (2014) and corresponds to the usual Tamari lattice in the case $v=(NE)^n$. Our main contribution is that the enumeration of intervals in $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$, over all $v$ of length $n$, is given by $\frac{2 (3n+3)!}{(n+2)! (2n+3)!}$. This formula was first obtained by Tutte(1963) for the enumeration of non-separable planar maps. Moreover, we give an explicit bijection from these intervals in $\rm{T{\scriptsize AM}}(v)$ to non-separable planar maps.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures. Title changed, originally titled "From generalized Tamari intervals to non-separable planar maps (extended abstract)", submitte