4,791 research outputs found
Reconstruction of freeform surfaces for metrology
The application of freeform surfaces has increased since their complex shapes closely express a product's functional specifications and their machining is obtained with higher accuracy. In particular, optical surfaces exhibit enhanced performance especially when they take aspheric forms or more complex forms with multi-undulations. This study is mainly focused on the reconstruction of complex shapes such as freeform optical surfaces, and on the characterization of their form. The computer graphics community has proposed various algorithms for constructing a mesh based on the cloud of sample points. The mesh is a piecewise linear approximation of the surface and an interpolation of the point set. The mesh can further be processed for fitting parametric surfaces (Polyworks® or Geomagic®). The metrology community investigates direct fitting approaches. If the surface mathematical model is given, fitting is a straight forward task. Nonetheless, if the surface model is unknown, fitting is only possible through the association of polynomial Spline parametric surfaces. In this paper, a comparative study carried out on methods proposed by the computer graphics community will be presented to elucidate the advantages of these approaches. We stress the importance of the pre-processing phase as well as the significance of initial conditions. We further emphasize the importance of the meshing phase by stating that a proper mesh has two major advantages. First, it organizes the initially unstructured point set and it provides an insight of orientation, neighbourhood and curvature, and infers information on both its geometry and topology. Second, it conveys a better segmentation of the space, leading to a correct patching and association of parametric surfaces.EMR
Genus statistics using the Delaunay tessellation field estimation method: (I) tests with the Millennium Simulation and the SDSS DR7
We study the topology of cosmic large-scale structure through the genus
statistics, using galaxy catalogues generated from the Millennium Simulation
and observational data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release
(SDSS DR7). We introduce a new method for constructing galaxy density fields
and for measuring the genus statistics of its isodensity surfaces. It is based
on a Delaunay tessellation field estimation (DTFE) technique that allows the
definition of a piece-wise continuous density field and the exact computation
of the topology of its polygonal isodensity contours, without introducing any
free numerical parameter. Besides this new approach, we also employ the
traditional approaches of smoothing the galaxy distribution with a Gaussian of
fixed width, or by adaptively smoothing with a kernel that encloses a constant
number of neighboring galaxies. Our results show that the Delaunay-based method
extracts the largest amount of topological information. Unlike the traditional
approach for genus statistics, it is able to discriminate between the different
theoretical galaxy catalogues analyzed here, both in real space and in redshift
space, even though they are based on the same underlying simulation model. In
particular, the DTFE approach detects with high confidence a discrepancy of one
of the semi-analytic models studied here compared with the SDSS data, while the
other models are found to be consistent.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, accepted by Ap
A Growing Self-Organizing Network for Reconstructing Curves and Surfaces
Self-organizing networks such as Neural Gas, Growing Neural Gas and many
others have been adopted in actual applications for both dimensionality
reduction and manifold learning. Typically, in these applications, the
structure of the adapted network yields a good estimate of the topology of the
unknown subspace from where the input data points are sampled. The approach
presented here takes a different perspective, namely by assuming that the input
space is a manifold of known dimension. In return, the new type of growing
self-organizing network presented gains the ability to adapt itself in way that
may guarantee the effective and stable recovery of the exact topological
structure of the input manifold
Towards Persistence-Based Reconstruction in Euclidean Spaces
Manifold reconstruction has been extensively studied for the last decade or
so, especially in two and three dimensions. Recently, significant improvements
were made in higher dimensions, leading to new methods to reconstruct large
classes of compact subsets of Euclidean space . However, the complexities
of these methods scale up exponentially with d, which makes them impractical in
medium or high dimensions, even for handling low-dimensional submanifolds. In
this paper, we introduce a novel approach that stands in-between classical
reconstruction and topological estimation, and whose complexity scales up with
the intrinsic dimension of the data. Specifically, when the data points are
sufficiently densely sampled from a smooth -submanifold of , our
method retrieves the homology of the submanifold in time at most ,
where is the size of the input and is a constant depending solely on
. It can also provably well handle a wide range of compact subsets of
, though with worse complexities. Along the way to proving the
correctness of our algorithm, we obtain new results on \v{C}ech, Rips, and
witness complex filtrations in Euclidean spaces
One machine, one minute, three billion tetrahedra
This paper presents a new scalable parallelization scheme to generate the 3D
Delaunay triangulation of a given set of points. Our first contribution is an
efficient serial implementation of the incremental Delaunay insertion
algorithm. A simple dedicated data structure, an efficient sorting of the
points and the optimization of the insertion algorithm have permitted to
accelerate reference implementations by a factor three. Our second contribution
is a multi-threaded version of the Delaunay kernel that is able to concurrently
insert vertices. Moore curve coordinates are used to partition the point set,
avoiding heavy synchronization overheads. Conflicts are managed by modifying
the partitions with a simple rescaling of the space-filling curve. The
performances of our implementation have been measured on three different
processors, an Intel core-i7, an Intel Xeon Phi and an AMD EPYC, on which we
have been able to compute 3 billion tetrahedra in 53 seconds. This corresponds
to a generation rate of over 55 million tetrahedra per second. We finally show
how this very efficient parallel Delaunay triangulation can be integrated in a
Delaunay refinement mesh generator which takes as input the triangulated
surface boundary of the volume to mesh
Geometry Processing of Conventionally Produced Mouse Brain Slice Images
Brain mapping research in most neuroanatomical laboratories relies on
conventional processing techniques, which often introduce histological
artifacts such as tissue tears and tissue loss. In this paper we present
techniques and algorithms for automatic registration and 3D reconstruction of
conventionally produced mouse brain slices in a standardized atlas space. This
is achieved first by constructing a virtual 3D mouse brain model from annotated
slices of Allen Reference Atlas (ARA). Virtual re-slicing of the reconstructed
model generates ARA-based slice images corresponding to the microscopic images
of histological brain sections. These image pairs are aligned using a geometric
approach through contour images. Histological artifacts in the microscopic
images are detected and removed using Constrained Delaunay Triangulation before
performing global alignment. Finally, non-linear registration is performed by
solving Laplace's equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Our methods
provide significant improvements over previously reported registration
techniques for the tested slices in 3D space, especially on slices with
significant histological artifacts. Further, as an application we count the
number of neurons in various anatomical regions using a dataset of 51
microscopic slices from a single mouse brain. This work represents a
significant contribution to this subfield of neuroscience as it provides tools
to neuroanatomist for analyzing and processing histological data.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure
JIGSAW-GEO (1.0): locally orthogonal staggered unstructured grid generation for general circulation modelling on the sphere
An algorithm for the generation of non-uniform, locally-orthogonal staggered
unstructured spheroidal grids is described. This technique is designed to
generate very high-quality staggered Voronoi/Delaunay meshes appropriate for
general circulation modelling on the sphere, including applications to
atmospheric simulation, ocean-modelling and numerical weather prediction. Using
a recently developed Frontal-Delaunay refinement technique, a method for the
construction of high-quality unstructured spheroidal Delaunay triangulations is
introduced. A locally-orthogonal polygonal grid, derived from the associated
Voronoi diagram, is computed as the staggered dual. It is shown that use of the
Frontal-Delaunay refinement technique allows for the generation of very
high-quality unstructured triangulations, satisfying a-priori bounds on element
size and shape. Grid-quality is further improved through the application of
hill-climbing type optimisation techniques. Overall, the algorithm is shown to
produce grids with very high element quality and smooth grading
characteristics, while imposing relatively low computational expense. A
selection of uniform and non-uniform spheroidal grids appropriate for
high-resolution, multi-scale general circulation modelling are presented. These
grids are shown to satisfy the geometric constraints associated with
contemporary unstructured C-grid type finite-volume models, including the Model
for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS-O). The use of user-defined mesh-spacing
functions to generate smoothly graded, non-uniform grids for multi-resolution
type studies is discussed in detail.Comment: Final revisions, as per: Engwirda, D.: JIGSAW-GEO (1.0): locally
orthogonal staggered unstructured grid generation for general circulation
modelling on the sphere, Geosci. Model Dev., 10, 2117-2140,
https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-2117-2017, 201
Principal component and Voronoi skeleton alternatives for curve reconstruction from noisy point sets
Surface reconstruction from noisy point samples must take into consideration the stochastic nature of the sample -- In other words, geometric algorithms reconstructing the surface or curve should not insist in following in a literal way each sampled point -- Instead, they must interpret the sample as a “point cloud” and try to build the surface as passing through the best possible (in the statistical sense) geometric locus that represents the sample -- This work presents two new methods to find a Piecewise Linear approximation from a Nyquist-compliant stochastic sampling of a quasi-planar C1 curve C(u) : R → R3, whose velocity vector never vanishes -- One of the methods articulates in an entirely new way Principal Component Analysis (statistical) and Voronoi-Delaunay (deterministic) approaches -- It uses these two methods to calculate the best possible tape-shaped polygon covering the planarised point set, and then approximates the manifold by the medial axis of such a polygon -- The other method applies Principal Component Analysis to find a direct Piecewise Linear approximation of C(u) -- A complexity comparison of these two methods is presented along with a qualitative comparison with previously developed ones -- It turns out that the method solely based on Principal Component Analysis is simpler and more robust for non self-intersecting curves -- For self-intersecting curves the Voronoi-Delaunay based Medial Axis approach is more robust, at the price of higher computational complexity -- An application is presented in Integration of meshes originated in range images of an art piece -- Such an application reaches the point of complete reconstruction of a unified mes
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