Simple and effective variational optimization of surface and volume triangulations

  • Authors:
  • Xiangmin Jiao;Duo Wang;Hongyuan Zha

  • Affiliations:
  • Stony Brook University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, 11794, Stony Brook, NY, USA;Stony Brook University, Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, 11794, Stony Brook, NY, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing, 30332, Atlanta, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Engineering with Computers - Special Issue: 17th International Meshing Roundtable - 2008; Guest Editor: Rao V. Garimella
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Optimizing surface and volume triangulations is critical for many advanced numerical simulation applications. We present a variational approach for smoothing triangulated surface and volume meshes to improve their overall mesh qualities. Our method seeks to reduce the discrepancies between the actual elements and ideal reference elements by minimizing two energy functions based on conformal and isometric mappings. We derive simple, closed-form formulas for the values, gradients, and Hessians of these energy functions, which reveal important connections of our method with some well-known concepts and methods in mesh generation and surface parameterization. We then introduce a simple and efficient iterative algorithm for minimizing the energy functions, including a novel asynchronous step-size control scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method experimentally and compare it against Laplacian smoothing and some other mesh smoothing techniques.