Irregular Subdivision and Signal Processing for Arbitrary Surface Triangulations

Peter Schröder

Computer Science Department

California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Recent progress in 3D acquisition techniques and mesh simplification methods has made triangulated mesh hierarchies of arbitrary topology a basic geometric modeling primitive. These meshes typically have no regular structure so that classical processing methods such as Fourier and Wavelet transforms do not immediately apply.

In this talk I will report on some very recent work which is aimed at building signal processing type algorithms for unstructured surface triangulations. In particular I will introduce a new non-uniform relaxation technique which lets us build a Burt-Adelson type detail pyramid on top of a mesh simplification hierarchy (Progressive Meshes of Hoppe). The resulting multiresolution hierarchy makes it easy to perform a full range of standard signal processing tasks such as smoothing, enhancement, filtering and editing of arbitrary surface triangulations. I will explain the basic components of our approach, the motivation behind it, and show some examples demonstrating the power of our method.

This is a joint work with Igor Guskov and Wim Sweldens.


Peter Schröder is member of the faculty at the Caltech Computer Science Department where he directs the Multi-Res Modeling Group (www.multires.caltech.edu). He did his PhD work with Pat Hanrahan in Princeton and has been working on wavelet style multiresolution algorithms for many classic graphics problems, a field in which he is considered a leading expert. Among other honors his work was recently recognized when he was named a Packard Fellow.


Edited by Leonidas Guibas