Metric combinatorics of convex polyhedra: cut loci and nonoverlapping unfoldings

This paper is a study of the interaction between the combinatorics of boundaries of convex polytopes in arbitrary dimension and their metric geometry. Let S be the boundary of a convex polytope of dimension d+1, or more generally let S be a `convex polyhedral pseudomanifold'. We prove that S has a polyhedral nonoverlapping unfolding into R^d, so the metric space S is obtained from a closed (usually nonconvex) polyhedral ball in R^d by identifying pairs of boundary faces isometrically. Our existence proof exploits geodesic flow away from a source point v in S, which is the exponential map to S from the tangent space at v. We characterize the `cut locus' (the closure of the set of points in S with more than one shortest path to v) as a polyhedral complex in terms of Voronoi diagrams on facets. Analyzing infinitesimal expansion of the wavefront consisting of points at constant distance from v on S produces an algorithmic method for constructing Voronoi diagrams in each facet, and hence the unfolding of S. The algorithm, for which we provide pseudocode, solves the discrete geodesic problem. Its main construction generalizes the source unfolding for boundaries of 3-polytopes into R^2. We present conjectures concerning the number of shortest paths on the boundaries of convex polyhedra, and concerning continuous unfolding of convex polyhedra. We also comment on the intrinsic non-polynomial complexity of nonconvex polyhedral manifolds.Comment: 47 pages; 21 PostScript (.eps) figures, most in colo

A framework for working with digitized cultural heritage artefacts

In this paper, we present our work in designing, implementing, and evaluating a set of 3D interactive spatial measurement tools in the context of Cultural Heritage Toolbox (CH Toolbox), a framework for computer-aided cultural heritage research. Our application utilizes a bi-manual, spaceball and mouse driven user interface to help the user manage visualized 3D models digitized from real artifacts. We have developed a virtual radius estimator, useful for analyzing incomplete pieces of radial artifacts, and a virtual tape measure, useful in measurement of geodesic distances between two points on the surface of an artifact. We tested the tools on the special case of pottery analysis

Computational Geometry Column 35

The subquadratic algorithm of Kapoor for finding shortest paths on a polyhedron is described

A minimalistic approach for fast computation of geodesic distances on triangular meshes

The computation of geodesic distances is an important research topic in Geometry Processing and 3D Shape Analysis as it is a basic component of many methods used in these areas. In this work, we present a minimalistic parallel algorithm based on front propagation to compute approximate geodesic distances on meshes. Our method is practical and simple to implement and does not require any heavy pre-processing. The convergence of our algorithm depends on the number of discrete level sets around the source points from which distance information propagates. To appropriately implement our method on GPUs taking into account memory coalescence problems, we take advantage of a graph representation based on a breadth-first search traversal that works harmoniously with our parallel front propagation approach. We report experiments that show how our method scales with the size of the problem. We compare the mean error and processing time obtained by our method with such measures computed using other methods. Our method produces results in competitive times with almost the same accuracy, especially for large meshes. We also demonstrate its use for solving two classical geometry processing problems: the regular sampling problem and the Voronoi tessellation on meshes.Comment: Preprint submitted to Computers & Graphic