Section: Scientific Foundations
Shape approximation and mesh generation
Complex shapes are ubiquitous in robotics (configuration spaces), computer graphics (animation models) or physical simulations (fluid models, molecular systems). In all these cases, no natural shape space is available or when such spaces exist they are not easily dealt with. When it comes to performing calculations, the objects under study must be discretized. On the other hand, several application areas such as Computer Aided Geometric Design or medical imaging require reconstructing 3D or 4D shapes from samples.
The questions aforementioned fall in the realm of geometric approximation theory , a topic Geometrica is actively involved in. More precisely, the generation of samples, the definition of differential quantities (e.g. curvatures) in a discrete setting, the geometric and topological control of approximations, as well as multi-scale representations are investigated. Connected topics of interest are also the progressive transmission of models over networks and their compression.
Surface mesh generation and surface reconstruction have received a great deal of attention by researchers in various areas ranging from computer graphics through numerical analysis to computational geometry. However, work in these areas has been mostly heuristic and the first theoretical foundations have been established only recently. Quality mesh generation amounts to finding a partition of a domain into linear elements (mostly triangles or quadrilaterals) with topological and geometric properties. Typically, one aims at constructing a piecewise linear (PL) approximation with the ``same'' topology as the original surface (same topology may have several meanings). In some contexts, one wants to simplify the topology in a controlled way. Regarding the geometric distance between the surface and its PL approximation, different measures must be considered: Hausdorff distance, errors on normals, curvatures, areas etc. In addition, the shape, angles or size of the elements must match certain criteria. We call remeshing the techniques involved when the input domain to be discretized is itself discrete. The input mesh is often highly irregular and non-uniform, since it typically comes as the output of a surface reconstruction algorithm applied to a point cloud obtained from a scanning device. Many geometry processing algorithms (e.g. smoothing, compression) benefit from remeshing, combined with uniform or curvature-adapted sampling. Geometrica intends to contribute to all aspects of this matter, both in theory and in practice.
Volumetric mesh generation consists in triangulating a given three-dimensional domain with tetrahedra having a prescribed size and shape. For instance, the tetrahedra in a general purpose mesh should be as regular as possible (isotropic case), whereas they should be elongated in certain directions for problem specific meshes. Volumetric mesh generation often makes use of surface mesh generation techniques (e.g. to approximate the boundary of the domain or interfaces between two media). Thanks to its strong experience with Delaunay triangulations, Geometrica recently made several contributions to the generation of volumetric meshes, and intends to pursue in this direction.
