Least Squares Subdivision Surfaces

International audienceThe usual approach to design subdivision schemes for curves and surfaces basically consists in combining proper rules for regular configurations, with some specific heuristics to handle extraordinary vertices. In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach, called Least Squares Subdivision Surfaces (LS^3), where the key idea is to iteratively project each vertex onto a local approximation of the current polygonal mesh. While the resulting procedure have the same complexity as simpler subdivision schemes, our method offers much higher visual quality, especially in the vicinity of extraordinary vertices. Moreover, we show it can be easily generalized to support boundaries and creases. The fitting procedure allows for a local control of the surface from the normals, making LS^3 very well suited for interactive freeform modeling applications. We demonstrate our approach on diadic triangular and quadrangular refinement schemes, though it can be applied to any splitting strategies

Reversing subdivision rules: local linear conditions and observations on inner products

AbstractIn a previous work (Samavati and Bartels, Comput. Graphics Forum 18 (1998) 97–119) we investigated how to reverse subdivision rules using global least-squares fitting. This led to multiresolution structures that could be viewed as semiorthogonal wavelet systems whose inner product was that for finite-dimensional Cartesian vector space. We produced simple and sparse reconstruction filters, but had to appeal to matrix factorization to obtain an efficient, exact decomposition. We also made some observations on how the inner product that defines the semiorthogonality influences the sparsity of the reconstruction filters. In this work we carry the investigation further by studying biorthogonal systems based upon subdivision rules and local least-squares fitting problems that reverse the subdivision. We are able to produce multiresolution structures for some common univariate subdivision rules that have both sparse reconstruction and decomposition filters. Three will be presented here – for quadratic and cubic B-spline subdivision and for the four-point interpolatory subdivision of Dyn et al. We observe that each biorthogonal system we produce can be interpreted as a semiorthogonal system with an inner product induced on the multiresolution that is quite different from that normally used. Some examples of the use of this approach on images, curves, and surfaces are given

Compression for Smooth Shape Analysis

Most 3D shape analysis methods use triangular meshes to discretize both the shape and functions on it as piecewise linear functions. With this representation, shape analysis requires fine meshes to represent smooth shapes and geometric operators like normals, curvatures, or Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunctions at large computational and memory costs. We avoid this bottleneck with a compression technique that represents a smooth shape as subdivision surfaces and exploits the subdivision scheme to parametrize smooth functions on that shape with a few control parameters. This compression does not affect the accuracy of the Laplace-Beltrami operator and its eigenfunctions and allow us to compute shape descriptors and shape matchings at an accuracy comparable to triangular meshes but a fraction of the computational cost. Our framework can also compress surfaces represented by point clouds to do shape analysis of 3D scanning data

Generalized Debye Sources Based EFIE Solver on Subdivision Surfaces

The electric field integral equation is a well known workhorse for obtaining fields scattered by a perfect electric conducting (PEC) object. As a result, the nuances and challenges of solving this equation have been examined for a while. Two recent papers motivate the effort presented in this paper. Unlike traditional work that uses equivalent currents defined on surfaces, recent research proposes a technique that results in well conditioned systems by employing generalized Debye sources (GDS) as unknowns. In a complementary effort, some of us developed a method that exploits the same representation for both the geometry (subdivision surface representations) and functions defined on the geometry, also known as isogeometric analysis (IGA). The challenge in generalizing GDS method to a discretized geometry is the complexity of the intermediate operators. However, thanks to our earlier work on subdivision surfaces, the additional smoothness of geometric representation permits discretizing these intermediate operations. In this paper, we employ both ideas to present a well conditioned GDS-EFIE. Here, the intermediate surface Laplacian is well discretized by using subdivision basis. Likewise, using subdivision basis to represent the sources, results in an efficient and accurate IGA framework. Numerous results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the approach

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