width preserving polyhedron simplification - computational-geometry

I need to simplify a 3d polyhedron while controlling the maximum allowable deviation of the width after simplification.
Does anybody know of a c++ library\c++ implementation\algorithm which allows for this?
I have read about CGAL mesh simplification, and I did not see an option to control for mesh maximal width deviation.
thank you.

I'm not sure how you define the width but using isotropic remeshing might be doing a good job here since all points in the remesh polyhedron will lie on the original surface at the end. One drawback is that the algorithm requires a edge-length to remesh the model (you cannot for example provide a number of expected edges).

Related

3D mesh edge detection / feature line computation algorithm

I have a program that visualizes triangular meshes and allows the users to draw on the meshes using a pen. I want to have a "snapping" mode in my system. The snapping mode performs drawing corrections for the user in the sense that the user-drawn lines are snapped to the nearest edge (or the silhouette) of that part of the mesh.
I'm looking for an algorithm that compute the edges visible on the mesh from a given point of view. By edges, I'm referring to the outlines of the shape: corner points and the lines between them (similar to the definition of an edge in computer vision/image processing -- such as Canny edges).
So far I've thought of two approaches for this:
Edge detection: so far I've only found this paper. Their method is understandable, yet the implementation is not trivial (due to tensor computations and some ambiguity in their explanations). The problem with this approach is that it produces "edge strength values" which is a value in the range [0, 1] for every vertex. The value of 1 indicates an edge vertex with a high confidence. This introduces extra thresholding parameters in the system which I'd rather not have. Their output looks like this (range [0, 1] scaled to [0, 65535]):
Rendering or non-photorealistic methods such as the one asked in this question or this paper. They seem to be able to create the silhouette that I'm after as can be seen below:
I'm not a graphics expert and as of yet I don't know whether their methods can be used for computation of the feature lines rather than rendering.
I was wondering if anybody has any ideas about a good algorithm for what I want to do. Since the system is very interactive, the performance is important. The snapping feature does not have to be enabled all the time (therefore, if the method is computationally expensive, some delay in when "snapping enabled" mode is toggled can be tolerated while the algorithm is computing the edges.) Also, if you know of any implementation (preferably open source), I'd be grateful if you could share it with me.
There are two types of edges that you want to detect:
silhouette edges are viewpoint dependent, they correspond to the places where the line of sight tangents the surfaces. With a triangulated model, they are easy to determine, as they are shared by a front-facing triangle and a back-facing one.
"angular" edges are viewpoint independent and formed by a discontinuity in the tangent plane direction. As a triangulated model has itself this kind of discontinuity, there is no exact criterion to find them. Just set a threshold on the angle formed by two triangles. This threshold must be such that smooth patches do not trigger.
By this approach, you will find the wanted edges in 3D.
This is not enough, as part of them are hidden by other surfaces. You have the option of integrating them as edges in the 3D model and letting the rendering engine do its job, or, if you have the courage, to implement an hidden lines removal algorithm. (The wikipedia link is a little terse.)
Since posting the question, something else came into my head. Since 2D edge detection is a very well-studied problem, one way of tackling the problem is performing 2D edge detection on the projection image of the mesh.
In other words, given a specific view of the mesh, one could generate a 2D image. A 2D edge detection algorithm (such as Canny edge detector) could then be run on the 2D image and the results can be back-projected to 3D to determine the silhouettes of the mesh in question. One possible advantage of this is simplicity!
Edit (2017):
Even though I moved away from this, I returned to this problem again for a different purpose. To anybody else looking into this problem: there is a paper that talks about various contours from meshes that's worth reading (the paper is "Suggestive Contours for Conveying Shape" by DeCarlo et al.).
Working implementation of the methods discussed in the paper are available here.

Boost::geometry : calculation of the centroid of a polygon

I've been working with the Boost geometry, mostly for manipulating polygons; I was using the centroid built-in method (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/libs/geometry/doc/html/geometry/reference/algorithms/centroid/centroid_2.html) for calculating the geometric (bary) center of my polygons, but recently after outputting the coordinates of my points (composing a specific polygon) (and analyzing them on the side with some Python scripts) I realized that the centroid coordinates the previous method was giving me do not correspond to the geometric mean of the points of the polygon.
I'm in two dimensions and putting it into equations, I should have:
x_centroid = \frac{1}{number of points composing the polygon} \sum{point i} x_i
and the same for the y coordinates. I'm now suspecting that this could have to do with the fact that the boost geometry library is not just looking at the points on the edge of the polygon (its outer ring) but treating it as a filled object.
Does any of you have some experience in manipulating these functions?
Btw, I using:
point my_center(0,0);
bg::centroid(my_polygon,my_center);
to compute the centroid.
Thank you.
In Boost.Geometry the algorithm proposed by Bashein and Detmer [1] is used by default for the calculation of a centroid of Areal Geometries.
The reason is that the simple average method fails for a case where many closely spaced vertices are placed at one side of a Polygon.
[1] Gerard Bashein and Paul R. Detmer. “Centroid of a Polygon”. Graphics Gems IV, Academic Press, 1994, pp. 3–6
That's what the centroid is -- the mean of the infinite number of points making up the filled polygon. It sounds like what you want is not the centroid, but just the average of the vertices.
Incidentally, "geometric mean" has a different definition than you think, and is not in any way applicable to this situation.
Centroid of polygon is considered as mass center of plane figure (for example, paper sheet), not center of vertices only

Looking for an efficient algorithm to find the boundary of a swept 2d shape

I have piecewise curve defining a generator (think brush) and a piecewise curve representing the path the brush follows. I wish to generate the boundary that the generator curve creates as it is swept across the path.
This is for an engineering CAD like application. I am looking for a general algorithm or code samples in any language.
I suggest the following papers:
"Approximate General Sweep Boundary of a 2D Curved Object" by Jae-Woo Ahn, Myung-Soo Kim and Soon-Bum Lim
"Real Time Fitting of Pressure Brushstrokes" by Thierry Pudet
"The Brush-Trajectory Approach to Figure Specification: Some Algebraic-Solutions"
The actual answer we used is too complex to post in full but in summary.
Sample the curve at regular intervals along the transformed path
Build a triangular mesh by joining the vertices from each sample to
the next and previous sample
Identify candidate silhouette edge by whose neighboring triangles normals point in opposite directions
Split all edges at intersections using a sweepline algorithm. This is the tricky part as we found we had to do this with a BigRational algorithm or subtle numerical errors crept in which broke the topology.
Convert the split edges into a planar graph
Find the closest of the split edges to some external test point
Walk around the outside of the graph. ( again all tests are done using big rational )
The performance of the algorithm is not brilliant due to the BigRational calculations. However we tried many ways to do this in floating point and we always got numerical edges cases where the resulting graph was not planar. If the graph is not planar then you can't walk around the outside of it.
If your have an arbitrarily complex shape translating and rotating along an arbitrary path, figuring out the area swept (and its boundary) using an exact method is going to be a really tough problem.
You might consider instead using a rendering-based approach:
start with a black canvas
densely sample the path of your moving shape
for each sample position and rotation, render the shape as white
you now have a canvas with a fairly good estimate of the swept shape
You can follow this up with these steps:
(optional) do some image processing to try to fix up any artifacts introduced by too-sparsely sampling the path of the shape
(optional) pass the canvas through an edge-finding filter to get the boundary of the swept shape

Scaling an arbitrary polygon

I've been scouring the internet for days, but have been unable to find a good answer (or at least one that made sense to me) to what seems like it should be a common question. How does one scale an arbitrary polygon? In particular, concave polygons. I need an algorithm which can handle concave (definitely) and self-intersecting (if possible) polygons. The obvious and simple algorithm I've been using to handle simple convex polygons is calculating the centroid of the polygon, translating that centroid to the origin, scaling all the vertices, and translating the polygon back to its original location.
This approach does not work for many (or maybe all) concave polygons as the centroid often falls outside the polygon, so the scaling operation also results in a translation and I need to be able to scale the polygon "in place" without the final result being translated.
Is anybody aware of a method for scaling concave polygons? Or maybe a way of finding the "visual center" which can be used as a frame of reference for the scaling operation?
Just to clarify, I'm working in 2D space and I would like to scale my polygons using the "visual center" as the frame of reference. So maybe another way to ask the question would be, how do I find the visual center of a concave and/or self-intersecting polygon?
Thanks!
I'm not sure what your problem is.
You're working in an affine space, and you're looking for an affine transformation to scale your polygon ?
If i'm right, just write the transformation matrix:
scaling matrix
homotethy
And transform your polygon with matrix
You can look up for affine transformation matrix.
hope it helps
EDIT
if you want to keep the same "center", you can just do an homotethy of parameter lambda with center G = barycenter of the polygon:
it verifies :
G won't move since it's the center of the homotethy.
It will still verify the relation below, so it will still be the barycenter. (you just multiply the relation by lambda)
in your case G is easy to determinate: G(x,y) : (average of x values of points, average of y values of points)
and it should do what you need
Perhaps Craig is looking for a "polygon offset" algorithm - where each edge in the polygon is offset by a given value. For example, given a clockwise oriented polygon, offsetting edges towards the left will increase the size of the polygon. If this is what Craig is looking for then this has been asked and answered before here - An algorithm for inflating/deflating (offsetting, buffering) polygons.
If you're looking for a ready made (opensource freeware) solution, I've also created a clipping library (Clipper) written in Delphi, C++ and C# which includes a rather simple polygon offsetting function.
The reason why you can't find a good answer is because you are being imprecise with your requirements. First explicitly define what you mean by "in-place". What is being kept constant?
Once you have figured that out, then translate the constant point to the origin, scale the polygon as usual, and translate back.

Algorithm for simplifying 3d surface?

I have a set of 3d points that approximate a surface. Each point, however, are subject to some error. Furthermore, the set of points contain a lot more points than is actually needed to represent the underlying surface.
What I am looking for is an algorithm to create a new (much smaller) set of points representing a simplified, smoother version of the surface (pardon for not having a better definition than "simplified, smoother"). The underlying surface is not a mathematical one so I'm not hoping to fit the data set to some mathematical function.
Instead of dealing with it as a point cloud, I would recommend triangulating a mesh using Delaunay triangulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation
Then decimate the mesh. You can research decimation algorithms, but you can get pretty good quick and dirty results with an algorithm that just merges adjacent tris that have similar normals.
I think you are looking for 'Level of detail' algorithms.
A simple one to implement is to break your volume (surface) into some number of sub-volumes. From the points in each sub-volume, choose a representative point (such as the one closest to center, or the closest to the average, or the average etc). use these points to redraw your surface.
You can tweak the number of sub-volumes to increase/decrease detail on the fly.
I'd approach this by looking for vertices (points) that contribute little to the curvature of the surface. Find all the sides emerging from each vertex and take the dot products of pairs (?) of them. The points representing very shallow "hills" will subtend huge angles (near 180 degrees) and have small dot products.
Those vertices with the smallest numbers would then be candidates for removal. The vertices around them will then form a plane.
Or something like that.
Google for Hugues Hoppe and his "surface reconstruction" work.
Surface reconstruction is used to find a meshed surface to fit the point cloud; however, this method yields lots of triangles. You can then apply mesh a reduction technique to reduce the polygon count in a way to minimize error. As an example, you can look at OpenMesh's decimation methods.
OpenMesh
Hugues Hoppe
There exist several different techniques for point-based surface model simplification, including:
clustering;
particle simulation;
iterative simplification.
See the survey:
M. Pauly, M. Gross, and L. P. Kobbelt. Efficient simplification of point-
sampled surfaces. In Proceedings of the conference on Visualization’02,
pages 163–170, Washington, DC, 2002. IEEE.
unless you parametrise your surface in some way i'm not sure how you can decide which points carry similar information (and can thus be thrown away).
i guess you can choose a bunch of points at random to get rid of, but that doesn't sound like what you want to do.
maybe points near each other (for some definition of 'near') can be considered to contain similar information, and so reduced to single representatives for each such group.
could you give some more details?
It's simpler to simplify a point cloud without the constraints of mesh triangles and indices.
smoothing and simplification are different tasks though. To simplify the cloud you should first get rid of noise artefacts by making a profile of the kind of noise that you have, it's frequency and directional caracteristics and do a noise profile compared type reduction. good normal vectors are helfpul for that.
here is a document about 5-6 simplifications using delauney, voronoi, and k nearest neighbour maths:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.9640&rep=rep1&type=pdf
A later version from 2008:
http://www.wseas.us/e-library/transactions/research/2008/30-705.pdf
here is a recent c++ version:
https://github.com/tudelft3d/masbcpp/blob/master/src/simplify.cpp

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