The use of Knuth-Bendix methods to solve the wordproblem in automatic groups
Journal of Symbolic Computation - Special issue on computational group theory: part 2
Multiperiodic functions for surface design
Selected papers of the international symposium on Free-form curves and free-form surfaces
Word Processing in Groups
Optimal System of Loops on an Orientable Surface
FOCS '02 Proceedings of the 43rd Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Greedy optimal homotopy and homology generators
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Computing geometry-aware handle and tunnel loops in 3D models
ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
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Given a loop on a surface, its homotopy class can be specified as a word consisting of letters representing the homotopy group generators. One of the interesting problems is how to compute the shortest word for a given loop. This is an NP-hard problem in general. However, for a closed surface that allows a hyperbolic metric and is equipped with a canonical set of fundamental group generators, the shortest word problem can be reduced to finding the shortest loop that is homotopic to the given loop, which can be solved efficiently. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the shortest words for loops given on triangulated surface meshes. The design of this algorithm is inspired and guided by the work of Dehn and Birman-Series. In support of the shortest word algorithm, we also propose efficient algorithms to compute shortest paths and shortest loops under hyperbolic metrics using a novel technique, called transient embedding, to work with the universal covering space. In addition, we employ several techniques to relieve the numerical errors. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the performance in practice.