Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	A Curvature Flow Based Fairing Algorithm of Quad-Dominant Meshes
Authors	HU Shi-Min LAI Yu-Kun YANG Yong-Liang
Address	(Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084)
Year	2008
Issue	No.9(1622—1628)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract Mesh model is the most extensively used 3D geometry representation in computer graphics and geometry processing. Quadrilateral/quad-dominant mesh has the unique advantage of representing 3D shapes because its structure fits the shape variation well according to human perception. Moreover, quadrilateral mesh can be directly applied to various fields as geometric modeling, subdivision surface and architecture design. This paper presents a differential properties based fairing algorithm on quad-dominant meshes. The method is computationally efficient and very easy to implement. During the fairing process, geometric features on the mesh model can be well preserved because of the geometry diffusion guided by curvature flow. T-junctions in the mesh structure are also under special consideration. Keywords mesh; quad-dominant; fairing Background With the development of 3D scanning techniques, 3D digital geometry is getting more and more widely used in various applications. 3D geometry is usually represented as meshes, due to their simplicity, generality and efficiency. Compared with irregular triangle meshes, quadrilateral or quad-dominant meshes have more regular connectivity and fit the shape variation well according to human perception. As a result, quadrilateral or quad-dominant meshes are suitable for various applications like geometric modeling, subdivision surfaces and architecture design. Quad-dominant meshes have different sources; sometimes they may contain unwanted noise. Thus it is worthwhile to consider fairing of such meshes. Relatively little work has been done in this direction. In this paper, the authors present a fairing algorithm of quad-dominant meshes based on curvature diffusion. Due to a general derivation, our method can deal with quad-dominant meshes, with T-vertices and irregularity polygons in a consistent way. Implicit diffusion is also extended to quad dominant meshes to improve the performance. This method is computationally efficient and easy to implement. Experimental results show that this method is insensitive to the mesh connectivity and produce reasonably smoothed results. This work was partially supported by the National Basic Research Program(973 Program) of China (No.2006CB303106) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863 Program) of China (No.2007AA01Z336).