Interactive Curvature Tensor Visualization on Digital Surfaces

International audienceInteractive visualization is a very convenient tool to explore complex scientific data or to try different parameter settings for a given processing algorithm. In this article, we present a tool to efficiently analyze the curvature tensor on the boundary of potentially large and dynamic digital objects (mean and Gaussian curvatures, principal curvatures , principal directions and normal vector field). More precisely, we combine a fully parallel pipeline on GPU to extract an adaptive triangu-lated isosurface of the digital object, with a curvature tensor estimation at each surface point based on integral invariants. Integral invariants being parametrized by a given ball radius, our proposal allows to explore interactively different radii and thus select the appropriate scale at which the computation is performed and visualized

Integral based Curvature Estimators in Digital Geometry

International audienceIn many geometry processing applications, the estimation of differential geometric quantities such as curvature or normal vector field is an essential step. When designing such estimators, we have to pay attention to both its theoretical properties and practical effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate a new class of estimators on digital shape boundaries based on Integral Invariants. More precisely, we provide proofs of multigrid convergence of curvature estimators which are easy to implement on digital data. Furthermore, we discuss about some algorithmic optimisations and detail a complete experimental evaluation

Integral based Curvature Estimators in Digital Geometry

International audienceIn many geometry processing applications, the estimation of differential geometric quantities such as curvature or normal vector field is an essential step. When designing such estimators, we have to pay attention to both its theoretical properties and practical effectiveness. In this paper, we investigate a new class of estimators on digital shape boundaries based on Integral Invariants. More precisely, we provide proofs of multigrid convergence of curvature estimators which are easy to implement on digital data. Furthermore, we discuss about some algorithmic optimisations and detail a complete experimental evaluation

Properties of Gauss digitized sets and digital surface integration

International audienceThis paper presents new topological and geometrical properties of Gauss digitizations of Euclidean shapes, most of them holding in arbitrary dimension $d$. We focus on $r$-regular shapes sampled by Gauss digitization at gridstep $h$. The digitized boundary is shown to be close to the Euclidean boundary in the Hausdorff sense, the minimum distance $\frac{\sqrt{d}}{2}h$ being achieved by the projection map $\xi$ induced by the Euclidean distance. Although it is known that Gauss digitized boundaries may not be manifold when $d \ge 3$, we show that non-manifoldness may only occur in places where the normal vector is almost aligned with some digitization axis, and the limit angle decreases with $h$. We then have a closer look at the projection of the digitized boundary onto the continuous boundary by $\xi$. We show that the size of its non-injective part tends to zero with $h$. This leads us to study the classical digital surface integration scheme, which allocates a measure to each surface element that is proportional to the cosine of the angle between an estimated normal vector and the trivial surface element normal vector. We show that digital integration is convergent whenever the normal estimator is multigrid convergent, and we explicit the convergence speed. Since convergent estimators are now available in the litterature, digital integration provides a convergent measure for digitized objects

Scale-space Feature Extraction on Digital Surfaces

International audienceA classical problem in many computer graphics applications consists in extracting significant zones or points on an object surface,like loci of tangent discontinuity (edges), maxima or minima of curvatures, inflection points, etc. These places have specific localgeometrical properties and often called generically features. An important problem is related to the scale, or range of scales,for which a feature is relevant. We propose a new robust method to detect features on digital data (surface of objects in Z^3 ),which exploits asymptotic properties of recent digital curvature estimators. In [1, 2], authors have proposed curvature estimators(mean, principal and Gaussian) on 2D and 3D digitized shapes and have demonstrated their multigrid convergence (for C^3 -smoothsurfaces). Since such approaches integrate local information within a ball around points of interest, the radius is a crucial parameter.In this article, we consider the radius as a scale-space parameter. By analyzing the behavior of such curvature estimators as the ballradius tends to zero, we propose a tool to efficiently characterize and extract several relevant features (edges, smooth and flat parts)on digital surfaces

Courbure discrète : théorie et applications

International audienceThe present volume contains the proceedings of the 2013 Meeting on discrete curvature, held at CIRM, Luminy, France. The aim of this meeting was to bring together researchers from various backgrounds, ranging from mathematics to computer science, with a focus on both theory and applications. With 27 invited talks and 8 posters, the conference attracted 70 researchers from all over the world. The challenge of finding a common ground on the topic of discrete curvature was met with success, and these proceedings are a testimony of this wor

Piecewise smooth reconstruction of normal vector field on digital data

International audienceWe propose a novel method to regularize a normal vector field defined on a digital surface (boundary of a set of voxels). When the digital surface is a digitization of a piecewise smooth manifold, our method localizes sharp features (edges) while regularizing the input normal vector field at the same time. It relies on the optimisation of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, originally defined for denoising and contour extraction in image processing [AT90]. We reformulate this functional to digital surface processing thanks to discrete calculus operators. Experiments show that the output normal field is very robust to digitization artifacts or noise, and also fairly independent of the sampling resolution. The method allows the user to choose independently the amount of smoothing and the length of the set of discontinuities. Sharp and vanishing features are correctly delineated even on extremely damaged data. Finally, our method can be used to enhance considerably the output of state-of- the-art normal field estimators like Voronoi Covariance Measure [MOG11] or Randomized Hough Transform [BM12]

Analysis of Noisy Digital Contours with Adaptive Tangential Cover

International audienceThe notion of tangential cover, based on maximal segments, is a well-known tool to study the geometrical characteristics of a discrete curve. However, it is not robust to noise, while extracted contours from digital images typically contain noise and this makes the geometric analysis tasks on such contours difficult. To tackle this issue, we investigate in this paper a discrete structure, named Adaptive Tangential Cover (ATC), which is based on the notion of tangential cover and on a local noise estimator. More specifically, the ATC is composed of maximal segments with different widths deduced from the local noise values estimated at each point of the contour. Furthermore, a parameter-free algorithm is also presented to compute ATC. This study leads to the proposal of several applications of ATC on noisy digital contours: dominant point detection, contour length estimator, tangent/normal estimator, detection of convex and concave parts. An extension of ATC to 3D curves is also proposed in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of this new notion