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

Algorithms for fat objects : decompositions and applications

Computational geometry is the branch of theoretical computer science that deals with algorithms and data structures for geometric objects. The most basic geometric objects include points, lines, polygons, and polyhedra. Computational geometry has applications in many areas of computer science, including computer graphics, robotics, and geographic information systems. In many computational-geometry problems, the theoretical worst case is achieved by input that is in some way "unrealistic". This causes situations where the theoretical running time is not a good predictor of the running time in practice. In addition, algorithms must also be designed with the worst-case examples in mind, which causes them to be needlessly complicated. In recent years, realistic input models have been proposed in an attempt to deal with this problem. The usual form such solutions take is to limit some geometric property of the input to a constant. We examine a specific realistic input model in this thesis: the model where objects are restricted to be fat. Intuitively, objects that are more like a ball are more fat, and objects that are more like a long pole are less fat. We look at fat objects in the context of five different problems—two related to decompositions of input objects and three problems suggested by computer graphics. Decompositions of geometric objects are important because they are often used as a preliminary step in other algorithms, since many algorithms can only handle geometric objects that are convex and preferably of low complexity. The two main issues in developing decomposition algorithms are to keep the number of pieces produced by the decomposition small and to compute the decomposition quickly. The main question we address is the following: is it possible to obtain better decompositions for fat objects than for general objects, and/or is it possible to obtain decompositions quickly? These questions are also interesting because most research into fat objects has concerned objects that are convex. We begin by triangulating fat polygons. The problem of triangulating polygons—that is, partitioning them into triangles without adding any vertices—has been solved already, but the only linear-time algorithm is so complicated that it has never been implemented. We propose two algorithms for triangulating fat polygons in linear time that are much simpler. They make use of the observation that a small set of guards placed at points inside a (certain type of) fat polygon is sufficient to see the boundary of such a polygon. We then look at decompositions of fat polyhedra in three dimensions. We show that polyhedra can be decomposed into a linear number of convex pieces if certain fatness restrictions aremet. We also show that if these restrictions are notmet, a quadratic number of pieces may be needed. We also show that if we wish the output to be fat and convex, the restrictions must be much tighter. We then study three computational-geometry problems inspired by computer graphics. First, we study ray-shooting amidst fat objects from two perspectives. This is the problem of preprocessing data into a data structure that can answer which object is first hit by a query ray in a given direction from a given point. We present a new data structure for answering vertical ray-shooting queries—that is, queries where the ray’s direction is fixed—as well as a data structure for answering ray-shooting queries for rays with arbitrary direction. Both structures improve the best known results on these problems. Another problem that is studied in the field of computer graphics is the depth-order problem. We study it in the context of computational geometry. This is the problem of finding an ordering of the objects in the scene from "top" to "bottom", where one object is above the other if they share a point in the projection to the xy-plane and the first object has a higher z-value at that point. We give an algorithm for finding the depth order of a group of fat objects and an algorithm for verifying if a depth order of a group of fat objects is correct. The latter algorithm is useful because the former can return an incorrect order if the objects do not have a depth order (this can happen if the above/below relationship has a cycle in it). The first algorithm improves on the results previously known for fat objects; the second is the first algorithm for verifying depth orders of fat objects. The final problem that we study is the hidden-surface removal problem. In this problem, we wish to find and report the visible portions of a scene from a given viewpoint—this is called the visibility map. The main difficulty in this problem is to find an algorithm whose running time depends in part on the complexity of the output. For example, if all but one of the objects in the input scene are hidden behind one large object, then our algorithm should have a faster running time than if all of the objects are visible and have borders that overlap. We give such an algorithm that improves on the running time of previous algorithms for fat objects. Furthermore, our algorithm is able to handle curved objects and situations where the objects do not have a depth order—two features missing from most other algorithms that perform hidden surface removal

Visibility Domains and Complexity

Two problems in discrete and computational geometry are considered that are related to questions about the combinatorial complexity of arrangements of visibility domains and about the hardness of path planning under cost measures defined using visibility domains. The first problem is to estimate the VC-dimension of visibility domains. The VC-dimension is a fundamental parameter of every range space that is typically used to derive upper bounds on the size of hitting sets. Better bounds on the VC-dimension directly translate into better bounds on the size of hitting sets. Estimating the VC-dimension of visibility domains has proven to be a hard problem. In this thesis, new tools to tackle this problem are developed. Encircling arguments are combined with decomposition techniques of a new kind. The main ingredient of the novel approach is the idea of relativization that makes it possible to replace in the analysis of intersections the complicated visibility domains by simpler geometric ranges. The main result here is the new upper bound of 14 on the VC-dimension of visibility polygons in simple polygons that improves significantly upon the previously known best upper bound of 23. For the VC-dimension of perimeter visibility domains, the new techniques yield an upper bound of 7 that leaves only a very small gap to the best known lower bound of 5. The second problem considered is to compute the barrier resilience of visibility domains. In barrier resilience problems, one is given a set of barriers and two points s and t in R^d. The task is to find the minimum number of barriers one has to remove such that there is a way between s and t that does not cross a barrier. In the field of sensor networks, the barriers are interpreted as sensor ranges and the barrier resilience of a network is a measure for its vulnerability. In this thesis the very natural special case where the barriers are visibility domains is investigated. It can also be formulated in terms of finding a so-called minimum witness path. For visibility domains in simple polygons it is shown that one can find an optimal path efficiently. For polygons with holes an approximation hardness result is shown that is stronger than previous hardness results in geometric settings. Two different three-dimensional settings are considered and their respective relations to the Minimum Neighborhood Path problem and the Minimum Color Path problem in graphs are demonstrated. For one of the three-dimensional problems a 2-approximation algorithm is designed. For the general problem of finding minimum witness paths among polyhedral obstacles it turns out that it is not approximable in a strong sense

Large bichromatic point sets admit empty monochromatic 4-gons

We consider a variation of a problem stated by Erd˝os and Szekeres in 1935 about the existence of a number fES(k) such that any set S of at least fES(k) points in general position in the plane has a subset of k points that are the vertices of a convex k-gon. In our setting the points of S are colored, and we say that a (not necessarily convex) spanned polygon is monochromatic if all its vertices have the same color. Moreover, a polygon is called empty if it does not contain any points of S in its interior. We show that any bichromatic set of n ≥ 5044 points in R2 in general position determines at least one empty, monochromatic quadrilateral (and thus linearly many).Postprint (published version

Geometric optimization on visibility problems: metaheuristic and exact solutions

Doutoramento em MatemáticaOs problemas de visibilidade têm diversas aplicações a situações reais. Entre os mais conhecidos, e exaustivamente estudados, estão os que envolvem os conceitos de vigilância e ocultação em estruturas geométricas (problemas de vigilância e ocultação). Neste trabalho são estudados problemas de visibilidade em estruturas geométricas conhecidas como polígonos, uma vez que estes podem representar, de forma apropriada, muitos dos objectos reais e são de fácil manipulação computacional. O objectivo dos problemas de vigilância é a determinação do número mínimo de posições para a colocação de dispositivos num dado polígono, de modo a que estes dispositivos consigam “ver” a totalidade do polígono. Por outro lado, o objectivo dos problemas de ocultação é a determinação do número máximo de posições num dado polígono, de modo a que quaisquer duas posições não se consigam “ver”. Infelizmente, a maior parte dos problemas de visibilidade em polígonos são NP-difíceis, o que dá origem a duas linhas de investigação: o desenvolvimento de algoritmos que estabelecem soluções aproximadas e a determinação de soluções exactas para classes especiais de polígonos. Atendendo a estas duas linhas de investigação, o trabalho é dividido em duas partes. Na primeira parte são propostos algoritmos aproximados, baseados essencialmente em metaheurísticas e metaheurísticas híbridas, para resolver alguns problemas de visibilidade, tanto em polígonos arbitrários como ortogonais. Os problemas estudados são os seguintes: “Maximum Hidden Vertex Set problem”, “Minimum Vertex Guard Set problem”, “Minimum Vertex Floodlight Set problem” e “Minimum Vertex k-Modem Set problem”. São também desenvolvidos métodos que permitem determinar a razão de aproximação dos algoritmos propostos. Para cada problema são implementados os algoritmos apresentados e é realizado um estudo estatístico para estabelecer qual o algoritmo que obtém as melhores soluções num tempo razoável. Este estudo permite concluir que as metaheurísticas híbridas são, em geral, as melhores estratégias para resolver os problemas de visibilidade estudados. Na segunda parte desta dissertação são abordados os problemas “Minimum Vertex Guard Set”, “Maximum Hidden Set” e “Maximum Hidden Vertex Set”, onde são identificadas e estudadas algumas classes de polígonos para as quais são determinadas soluções exactas e/ou limites combinatórios.Visibility problems have several applications to real-life problems. Among the most distinguished and exhaustively studied visibility problems are the ones involving concepts of guarding and hiding on geometrical structures (guarding and hiding problems). This work deals with visibility problems on geometrical structures known as polygons, since polygons are appropriate representations of many real-world objects and are easily handled by computers. The objective of the guarding problems studied in this thesis is to find a minimum number of device positions on a given polygon such that these devices collectively ''see'' the whole polygon. On the other hand, the goal of the hiding problems is to find a maximum number of positions on a given polygon such that no two of these positions can “see" each other. Unfortunately, most of the visibility problems on polygons are NP-hard, which opens two lines of investigation: the development of algorithms that establish approximate solutions and the determination of exact solutions on special classes of polygons. Accordingly, this work is divided in two parts where these two lines of investigation are considered. The first part of this thesis proposes approximation algorithms, mainly based on metaheuristics and hybrid metaheuristics, to tackle some visibility problems on arbitrary and orthogonal polygons. The addressed problems are the Maximum Hidden Vertex Set problem, the Minimum Vertex Guard Set problem, the Minimum Vertex Floodlight Set problem and the Minimum Vertex k-Modem Set problem. Methods that allow the determination of the performance ratio of the developed algorithms are also proposed. For each problem, the proposed algorithms are implemented and a statistical study is performed to determine which of the developed methods obtains the best solution in a reasonable amount of time. This study allows to conclude that, in general, the hybrid metaheuristics are the best approach to solve the studied visibility problems. The second part of this dissertation addresses the Minimum Vertex Guard Set problem, the Maximum Hidden Set problem and the Maximum Hidden Vertex Set problem, where some classes of polygons are identified and studied and for which are determined exact solutions and/or combinatorial bounds

Collection of abstracts of the 24th European Workshop on Computational Geometry

International audienceThe 24th European Workshop on Computational Geomety (EuroCG'08) was held at INRIA Nancy - Grand Est & LORIA on March 18-20, 2008. The present collection of abstracts contains the 63 scientific contributions as well as three invited talks presented at the workshop

Abstracts for the twentyfirst European workshop on Computational geometry, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands, March 9-11, 2005

This volume contains abstracts of the papers presented at the 21st European Workshop on Computational Geometry, held at TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands) on March 9–11, 2005. There were 53 papers presented at the Workshop, covering a wide range of topics. This record number shows that the field of computational geometry is very much alive in Europe. We wish to thank all the authors who submitted papers and presented their work at the workshop. We believe that this has lead to a collection of very interesting abstracts that are both enjoyable and informative for the reader. Finally, we are grateful to TU Eindhoven for their support in organizing the workshop and to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for sponsoring the workshop

LIPIcs, Volume 248, ISAAC 2022, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 248, ISAAC 2022, Complete Volum