What's the Situation with Intelligent Mesh Generation: A Survey and Perspectives

Intelligent Mesh Generation (IMG) represents a novel and promising field of research, utilizing machine learning techniques to generate meshes. Despite its relative infancy, IMG has significantly broadened the adaptability and practicality of mesh generation techniques, delivering numerous breakthroughs and unveiling potential future pathways. However, a noticeable void exists in the contemporary literature concerning comprehensive surveys of IMG methods. This paper endeavors to fill this gap by providing a systematic and thorough survey of the current IMG landscape. With a focus on 113 preliminary IMG methods, we undertake a meticulous analysis from various angles, encompassing core algorithm techniques and their application scope, agent learning objectives, data types, targeted challenges, as well as advantages and limitations. We have curated and categorized the literature, proposing three unique taxonomies based on key techniques, output mesh unit elements, and relevant input data types. This paper also underscores several promising future research directions and challenges in IMG. To augment reader accessibility, a dedicated IMG project page is available at \url{https://github.com/xzb030/IMG_Survey}

T-spline based unifying registration procedure for free-form surface workpieces in intelligent CMM

With the development of the modern manufacturing industry, the free-form surface is widely used in various fields, and the automatic detection of a free-form surface is an important function of future intelligent three-coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). To improve the intelligence of CMMs, a new visual system is designed based on the characteristics of CMMs. A unified model of the free-form surface is proposed based on T-splines. A discretization method of the T-spline surface formula model is proposed. Under this discretization, the position and orientation of the workpiece would be recognized by point cloud registration. A high accuracy evaluation method is proposed between the measured point cloud and the T-spline surface formula. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has the potential to realize the automatic detection of different free-form surfaces and improve the intelligence of CMMs

Quad Meshing

Triangle meshes have been nearly ubiquitous in computer graphics, and a large body of data structures and geometry processing algorithms based on them has been developed in the literature. At the same time, quadrilateral meshes, especially semi-regular ones, have advantages for many applications, and significant progress was made in quadrilateral mesh generation and processing during the last several years. In this State of the Art Report, we discuss the advantages and problems of techniques operating on quadrilateral meshes, including surface analysis and mesh quality, simplification, adaptive refinement, alignment with features, parametrization, and remeshing

Neural Volumetric Mesh Generator

Deep generative models have shown success in generating 3D shapes with different representations. In this work, we propose Neural Volumetric Mesh Generator(NVMG) which can generate novel and high-quality volumetric meshes. Unlike the previous 3D generative model for point cloud, voxel, and implicit surface, the volumetric mesh representation is a ready-to-use representation in industry with details on both the surface and interior. Generating this such highly-structured data thus brings a significant challenge. We first propose a diffusion-based generative model to tackle this problem by generating voxelized shapes with close-to-reality outlines and structures. We can simply obtain a tetrahedral mesh as a template with the voxelized shape. Further, we use a voxel-conditional neural network to predict the smooth implicit surface conditioned on the voxels, and progressively project the tetrahedral mesh to the predicted surface under regularizations. The regularization terms are carefully designed so that they can (1) get rid of the defects like flipping and high distortion; (2) force the regularity of the interior and surface structure during the deformation procedure for a high-quality final mesh. As shown in the experiments, our pipeline can generate high-quality artifact-free volumetric and surface meshes from random noise or a reference image without any post-processing. Compared with the state-of-the-art voxel-to-mesh deformation method, we show more robustness and better performance when taking generated voxels as input

Aspects of Unstructured Grids and Finite-Volume Solvers for the Euler and Navier-Stokes Equations

One of the major achievements in engineering science has been the development of computer algorithms for solving nonlinear differential equations such as the Navier-Stokes equations. In the past, limited computer resources have motivated the development of efficient numerical schemes in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) utilizing structured meshes. The use of structured meshes greatly simplifies the implementation of CFD algorithms on conventional computers. Unstructured grids on the other hand offer an alternative to modeling complex geometries. Unstructured meshes have irregular connectivity and usually contain combinations of triangles, quadrilaterals, tetrahedra, and hexahedra. The generation and use of unstructured grids poses new challenges in CFD. The purpose of this note is to present recent developments in the unstructured grid generation and flow solution technology

Dense Piecewise Planar RGB-D SLAM for Indoor Environments

The paper exploits weak Manhattan constraints to parse the structure of indoor environments from RGB-D video sequences in an online setting. We extend the previous approach for single view parsing of indoor scenes to video sequences and formulate the problem of recovering the floor plan of the environment as an optimal labeling problem solved using dynamic programming. The temporal continuity is enforced in a recursive setting, where labeling from previous frames is used as a prior term in the objective function. In addition to recovery of piecewise planar weak Manhattan structure of the extended environment, the orthogonality constraints are also exploited by visual odometry and pose graph optimization. This yields reliable estimates in the presence of large motions and absence of distinctive features to track. We evaluate our method on several challenging indoors sequences demonstrating accurate SLAM and dense mapping of low texture environments. On existing TUM benchmark we achieve competitive results with the alternative approaches which fail in our environments.Comment: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201

A framework for automatic and perceptually valid facial expression generation

Facial expressions are facial movements reflecting the internal emotional states of a character or in response to social communications. Realistic facial animation should consider at least two factors: believable visual effect and valid facial movements. However, most research tends to separate these two issues. In this paper, we present a framework for generating 3D facial expressions considering both the visual the dynamics effect. A facial expression mapping approach based on local geometry encoding is proposed, which encodes deformation in the 1-ring vector. This method is capable of mapping subtle facial movements without considering those shape and topological constraints. Facial expression mapping is achieved through three steps: correspondence establishment, deviation transfer and movement mapping. Deviation is transferred to the conformal face space through minimizing the error function. This function is formed by the source neutral and the deformed face model related by those transformation matrices in 1-ring neighborhood. The transformation matrix in 1-ring neighborhood is independent of the face shape and the mesh topology. After the facial expression mapping, dynamic parameters are then integrated with facial expressions for generating valid facial expressions. The dynamic parameters were generated based on psychophysical methods. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods have been tested using various face models with different shapes and topological representations