A new method for noise removal of arbitrary surfaces
meshes is presented which focuses on the preservation
and sharpening of non-linear geometric features such
as curved surface regions and feature lines. Our method
uses a prescribed mean curvature flow (PMC) for simplicial
surfaces which is based on three new contributions:
1. the definition and efficient calculation of a
discrete shape operator and principal curvature properties
on simplicial surfaces that is fully consistent with
the well-known discrete mean curvature formula, 2. an
anisotropic discrete mean curvature vector that combines
the advantages of the mean curvature normal with
the special anisotropic behaviour along feature lines of
a surface, and 3. an anisotropic prescribed mean curvature
flow which converges to surfaces with an estimated
mean curvature distribution and with preserved nonlinear
features. Additionally, the PMC flow prevents
boundary shrinkage at constrained and free boundary
segments.
In this work, we study the spectra and eigenmodes of the Hessian of various discrete surface energies and discuss applications to shape analysis. In particular, we consider a physical model that describes the vibration modes and frequencies of a surface through the eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the Hessian of a deformation energy, and we
derive a closed form representation for the Hessian (at the rest state of the energy) for a general class of deformation energies. Furthermore, we design a quadratic energy, such that the eigenmodes of the Hessian of
this energy are sensitive to the extrinsic curvature of the surface. Based on these spectra and eigenmodes, we derive two shape signatures. One that measures the similarity of points on a surface, and another that
can be used to identify features of the surface. In addition, we discuss a
spectral quadrangulation scheme for surfaces.
We provide conditions for convergence of polyhedral surfaces and their
discrete geometric properties to smooth surfaces embedded in R^3. The
notion of totally normal convergence is shown to be equivalent to the convergence
of either one of the following: surface area, intrinsic metric, and
Laplace-Beltrami operators. We further show that totally normal convergence
implies convergence results for shortest geodesics, mean curvature,
and solutions to the Dirichlet problem. This work provides the justifi-
cation for a discrete theory of differential geometric operators defined on
polyhedral surfaces based on a variational formulation.