Section: Research Program

Approximation

Our objective is to explore the approximation of complex shapes and scenes with surface and volume meshes, as well as on surface and domain tiling. A general way to state the shape approximation problem is to say that we search for the shape discretization (possibly with several levels of detail) that realizes the best complexity / distortion trade-off. Such a problem statement requires defining a discretization model, an error metric to measure distortion as well as a way to measure complexity. The latter is most commonly expressed in number of polygon primitives, but other measures closer to information theory lead to measurements such as number of bits or minimum description length.

For surface meshes we intend to conceive methods which provide control and guarantees both over the global approximation error and over the validity of the embedding. In addition, we seek for resilience to heterogeneous data, and robustness to noise and outliers. This would allow repairing and simplifying triangle soups with cracks, self-intersections and gaps. Another exploratory objective is to deal generically with different error metrics such as the symmetric Hausdorff distance, or a Sobolev norm which mixes errors in geometry and normals.

For surface and domain tiling the term meshing is substituted for tiling to stress the fact that tiles may be not just simple elements, but can model complex smooth shapes such as bilinear quadrangles. Quadrangle surface tiling is central for the so-called resurfacing problem in reverse engineering: the goal is to tile an input raw surface geometry such that the union of the tiles approximates the input well and such that each tile matches certain properties related to its shape or its size. In addition, we may require parameterization domains with a simple structure. Our goal is to devise surface tiling algorithms that are both reliable and resilient to defect-laden inputs, effective from the shape approximation point of view, and with flexible control upon the structure of the tiling.