Constraint-Based Fairing of Surface Meshes

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 10

Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (2007)

Alexander Belyaev, Michael Garland (Editors)

Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Klaus Hildebrandt Konrad Polthier

Freie Universität Berlin

Abstract
We propose a constraint-based method for the fairing of surface meshes. The main feature of our approach is that
the resulting smoothed surface remains within a prescribed distance to the input mesh. For example, specifying
the maximum distance in the order of the measuring precision of a laser scanner allows noise to be removed while
preserving the accuracy of the scan.
The approach is modeled as an optimization problem where a fairness measure is minimized subject to constraints
that control the spatial deviation of the surface. The problem is efficiently solved by an active set Newton method.

1. Introduction surface needed to evaluate the energy. A measure of first or-


der is the area of the surface. Since area is not invariant under
The instant availability of high-quality digital models of 3D
scaling, Delingette [Del01] proposed using the isoperimetric
surfaces becomes an essential prerequisite in many research
ratio A3 /V 2 as a scale invariant first-order fairness measure
areas, industrial modeling, e-commerce, medical treatment
for closed surfaces. Here A denotes the area and V is the
planning, archeology, and restoration, just to name a few.
volume enclosed by the surface. Second-order measures re-
Acquisition technologies such as laser scans for 3D surface
late to curvature, such as integrals of squares of curvature

models or CT, MRI and other devices for volumetric shapes
terms. Prominent examples
 2
are the bending energy H 2 dA,
can measure data with high accuracy. Nevertheless the accu-
the total curvature (κ1 + κ22 ) dA, and the Willmore energy

racy is often lost in the mesh creation pipeline. A crucial step
(κ1 − κ2 )2 dA. Here κ1 and κ2 denote the principal curva-
in this pipeline is the removal of geometric noise contained
tures and H = κ1 + κ2 the mean curvature. An example of
in the positions of the measured points. Many techniques to
a third-order measure is the curvature variation energy pro-
effectively remove the noise have been proposed, but these
posed by Moreton and Sequin [MS92]. The Euler Lagrange
may spoil the accuracy of the data.
equation of this energy is of sixth order where minimization
Our new method provides the guaranty that after noise becomes a delicate task; especially on meshes.
removal the surface still lies within the accuracy of the mea-
Improving fairness. Evolution methods are a technique to
sured data. This approach is designed for applications where
improve the fairness of a surface. Such evolving surfaces
accuracy is crucial; for example, technical or medical appli-
monotonically decrease a fairness measure and are described
cations as well as digitalization of cultural heritage.
as the solution of a (usually non-linear) parabolic partial dif-
Measuring fairness. Fairness energies are an attempt to es- ferential equation. The L2 -gradient flow of the area func-
tablish quantitative measures for fairness of a shape. Finding tional evolves each point of the surface along its normal
a commonly-accepted measure of fairness is a delicate task, direction with a velocity equal to the mean curvature and
due to the inherent subjectivity of rating the appearance of is therefore called the mean curvature flow. The underlying
a geometry as well as the specific demands of applications. flow equation is of diffusion type ∂t X = ΔX, where X is a
Nevertheless, one can agree on some general criteria: a fair- family of immersions of the surface and Δ is the Laplace-
ness energy should be independent of the parametrization of Beltrami operator of X. Smoothing algorithms based on this
the surface, invariant under rigid motions and scaling, and equation are often referred to as Laplace smoothing.
spheres should be among the minimizers of the energy.
Taubin [Tau95] applied this approach to surface smooth-
Different measures of fairness have been proposed. These ing using a linearization of the flow equation, which keeps
can be classified by the order of the highest derivative of the the Laplace operator unchanged during the evolution. Based

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Figure 1: An original noisy scan of a Chinese lion with 1.3 m triangles and height about 10 cm (left).The smoothed mesh (right)
stays within a 0.1 mm distance from the initial mesh. The surfaces are colored by mean curvature, with color range from white
(negative curvature) to red (positive curvature).

on this linear equation, he constructed a low-pass filter for recent years. Yoshizawa and Belyaev [YB02] describe a di-
meshes in analogy to filters used in signal processing. Des- rect discretization of the flow equation using the cotan for-
brun et al. [DMSB99] applied the mean curvature flow to mula to discretize terms related to mean curvature and the
mesh smoothing and used the more faithful cotan discretiza- angle defect for Gauss curvature. Clarenz et al. [CDD∗ 04]
tion of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Furthermore, they em- present a finite element discretization using linear Lagrange
ployed an implicit scheme for the time integration to over- elements. The basis of their scheme is a decomposition of
come the step-size restrictions of explicit schemes. the weak formulation of the flow equation into a coupled
system of second-order equations in which the Gauss cur-
Feature preserving schemes. A side effect of Laplace vature term, which is difficult to discretize, is removed.
smoothing is that it quickly smoothes out geometric Bobenko [Bob05] constructs a discrete Willmore functional
features such as sharp corners. Anisotropic diffusion that preserves the Möbius group, the symmetry group of the
schemes [CDR00, TWBO02, BX03, HP04] preserve or even continuous energy. Bobenko and Schröder [BS05] present an
enhance sharp corners by suppressing diffusion in direc- implicit scheme to integrate the gradient flow of this energy.
tions of high curvature. Anisotropic geometric diffusion de-
rives from the Perona Malik filter [PM87] in image process- The bending energy plays an essential role in the
ing. A related technique - the bilateral filter [TM98] - has simulation of cloth. Common edge-based discretization
been transferred to meshes by Fleishman et al. [FDCO03] schemes [BW98, BMF03, GHDS03, WBH∗ 07] measure
and Jones et al. [JDD03]. Recently, an extension employ- mean curvature at the edges of the mesh [CSM03, HP04].
ing non-local means has been presented by Yoshizawa et Such a discrete energy is given as a sum of contributions
al. [YBS06]. Comparable results can be achieved by meth- from stencils that consist of two triangles sharing an inte-
ods based on Wiener filtering [PSZ01, GP01, Ale02]. rior edge. The small stencil reduces the complexity of the
expressions for the energy and its gradient, which in turn ac-
Second order fairness measures. While minimizers of the celerates the evaluation and simplifies the implementation.
area functional are determined by values at the boundary,
second order fairness measures such as bending energy or Constrained fairing. To assess the quality of the output
Willmore energy allow for C1 boundary conditions; i.e. po- of a smoothing method, additionally to fairness, the devi-
sitions and normals can be prescribed. This makes second- ation of the result from the initial surface (e.g. measured
order functionals attractive for the construction of fair spline data) is an important criterion. Belyaev and Othake [BO03]
surfaces in geometric design [WN01]. By specifying consis- use integrals of the squared distance and the squared devia-
tent data at the boundaries of the individual patches, glob- tion of normals to compare the results produced by different
ally G1 surfaces can be constructed. Kobbelt and Schnei- smoothing methods.
der [SK00] construct fair meshes with G1 boundary condi-
tions as the solution of a fourth-order differential equation. Least-square meshes proposed by Sorkine et al. [SCO04,
NISA06] minimize a weighted sum of two quadratic en-
For meshes, stable discretizations of the Willmore energy ergies, the biharmonic energy and a weighted sum of the
and its fourth-order gradient flow have been developed in squared distances of each vertex to its initial position. Ex-

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Figure 2: Removing marching cubes artifacts from a human pelvis (~28 cm width) model extracted from computed tomography
data. The maximum deviation of the smoothed mesh (right) from the initial surface is 1 mm.

tending this approach Volodine et al. [VVR06] present a 1.1. Contributions


scheme to compute minimizers of the biharmonic energy un-
We present a new constrained-based denoising and fairing
der the constraint that the sum of the squared distances is less
algorithm which delivers high-quality fairing and a guar-
than a prescribed value. Since for larger meshes the com-
anty that all points of the smoothed surface remain within
putation of the exact solution of this problem is too costly,
a prescribed distance to their initial positions. Our method
they describe a scheme to approximate the solution. Liu et
is based on a novel combination of box constraints with a
al. [LBH∗ 01] propose a different type of constraint: the po-
discrete bending energy and an efficient optimization proce-
sitions of the barycenters of all triangles are fixed. This is
dure.
very restrictive; for example, if noise is added to a planar
mesh, the vertices and the barycenters move out of the plane. The scheme is modeled as a constrained non-linear op-
Since the barycenters keep their position during smoothing, timization problem that is solved by an active set Newton
the plane cannot be recovered. method with gradient projection. We present a robust and
efficient approximation scheme for the second-order infor-
Gibson [Gib98] describes a technique to reduce aliasing mation required by the Newton method. The computational
effects in isosurfaces extracted from binary volume data. In cost of the method is comparable to that of implicit integra-
the first step an approximate isosurface, which has all ver- tion schemes for geometric flows.
tices located at points of the volume grid, is extracted. Then
Applications of our scheme include denoising of scan data
an energy is minimized under the constraint, so that each
with the guaranty that no point of the smoothed surface de-
vertex of the surface mesh remains within the eight vox-
viates further than the accuracy of the scanning device from
els adjacent to the initial position of the vertex. Since the
its measured position, as well as removal of aliasing and ter-
energy - a spring energy with zero rest length - is of first
racing artifacts of isosurfaces extracted from volumetric data
order, sharp bendings appear where the surface touches the
assuring that the surface remains within the domain consist-
constraints. Gibson notes that smoother surfaces could be
ing of the voxels that contain the initial surface and their
produced using an energy that involves curvature, thus it is
1-neighbors. This scheme yields a new level of control over
of second order. Nielson et al. [NGH∗ 03] present a related
surface smoothing that can be useful in the process of con-
technique using a volume grid to define constraints as well.
verting measured data into high-accuracy models for techni-
The scheme can process meshes, but requires the surface to
cal or medical applications as well as for the digitization of
surround a volume. First, a binary field is constructed that
cultural heritage.
has value one at grid points inside the volume surrounded by
the mesh and zero outside. Next, the isosurface correspond- A property of common evolution based smoothing meth-
ing to the value 0.5 is extracted. Each vertex of this surface is ods is that if they are not stopped at the right time, the model
located at the midpoint of an edge of the volume grid. Then is oversmoothed or even degenerates. In contrast, additional
an energy is minimized with the constraint that each vertex iterations of the presented method can only improve the re-
remains on the corresponding edge of the volume grid. The sult. Furthermore, there is only one parameter to control the
energy is the sum over integrals of the squared curvature of method, the maximum deviation tolerance, which for noise
curves that are generated by intersection of the mesh with removal relates to the accuracy of the data. We believe that
planes. The sum runs over all coordinate planes that contain these are important steps towards an automatization of the
grid points. smoothing process.

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Figure 3: Noise removal from a range image. The maximum tolerance is 0.1 mm and the height of the object is 30 cm. The right
image shows the smoothed surface colored by the distance of the initial (noisy) to the smoothed surface.

2. Discrete Fairness Energy conforming Crouzeix-Raviart finite elements. The energy is


a sum of contributions from hinge stencils
The fairness energy used in the optimization problem must
be at least of second order, otherwise the surface would 3 e2 θe
develop sharp bendings or staircasing artifacts at the con- E(M) = ∑ 2 A e
cos( )2 ,
2
(1)
e∈M
straints. Three examples of second-order energies, the bend-
ing energy, the Willmore energy, and the total curvature are where Ae is the combined area of the two triangles adjacent
closely related and differ only by a multiple of the integral of to the edge e, and θe is the dihedral angle at e. The non-
the Gauss curvature over the surface. By the Gauss-Bonnet linear gradient of the energy can be computed efficiently;
theorem, this integral is constant for compact closed surfaces for an explicit formula see [WBH∗ 07].
since it depends only on the topology of the surface. For
compact surfaces with boundary the integral of the Gauss
3. Constrained Optimization Problem
curvature is invariant under variations that fix positions and
normals at the boundary. Hence in both cases the three ener- Our fairing method is modeled as a constrained non-linear
gies have the same minimizers. optimization problem. The constraints assure that during the
smoothing process, no point of the surface deviates more
Either of the three energies is a good candidate for
than a prescribed distance from its initial position. The def-
our purposes. An alternative second-order fairness measure
inition of the constraints involves a deviation measure that
would be the integral of the squared Gauss curvature. But
takes into account the maximum deviation rather than the
by Gauss’ Theorema Egregium this energy only depends on
usual integral of the squared distance. We first define the
the metric of the surface, which rules out this energy. For ex-
discrete maximum deviation measure, then describe the op-
ample, take a piece of paper and bend it. There is no metric
timization problem.
distortion; Gauss curvature does not change.
For two meshes M and N that have the same connectivity,
We use the discrete bending energy proposed by Wardet-
we define the discrete maximum deviation measure d∞ as
zky et al. [WBH∗ 07], which uses the edge-based mean
curvature vector [HP04] and can be derived using non- d∞ (M, N) = maxi mi − ni R3 , (2)

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Figure 4: Noise removal from the scanned blade model with 390 k triangles. Details are shown on the right.

where mi and ni are the vertices of M respectively N. The part δ∞ . At first the maximum deviation measure is only
measure d∞ describes a metric on the set of all meshes with defined for parametrized surfaces. Since the maps f and g
a fixed connectivity. Let Bε (M) denote the closed ball with are only required to be continuous, the measure δ∞ can be
radius ε around a mesh M with respect to this metric. Ge- evaluated for meshes as well. Let the domain A be a mesh
ometrically speaking, a mesh N is in the set Bε (M) if each embedded in R3 . Then every mesh M in R3 with the same
vertex ni of N lies in the Euclidean ball of radius ε around connectivity as A can be parametrized by the continuous
the corresponding vertex mi of M. function IM : A → R3 mapping each vertex of ai of A to the
coordinates of the corresponding vertex mi of M and linear
Now we can state the optimization problem. Given a mesh
interpolation in the triangles. For two such functions IM and
M and a positive ε, find a mesh N that minimizes the discrete
 ∈ Bε (M). IN representing meshes M and N the continuous deviation
bending energy over all meshes N
measure δ∞ (IM , IN ) equals the supremum of the function
IM − IN R3 . The supremum is attained at a vertex of the
3.1. Discrete Deviation Measure mesh, hence for meshes the continuous measure equals the
Consider two surfaces described by continuous functions discrete measure
f , g mapping a domain A into R3 ; the (continuous) maxi- δ∞ (IM , IN ) = d∞ (M, N).
mum deviation measure is then
δ∞ ( f , g) = sup  f (x) − g(x)R3 . 4. Minimization Procedure
x∈A
The objective of this section is to relate the discrete max- The constraints we are dealing with are spheres around all
imum deviation measure d∞ to its continuous counter- vertices of the mesh. In order to simplify the minimization
procedure we approximate the spheres by boxes with side
length 2ε. Active set Newton solvers with gradient projec-
tion are among the most effective solvers for large-scale box
constrained non-linear optimization problems. For a general
introduction to active set and gradient projection methods we
refer to [NW06]. For an analysis and discussion of solvers
of this type for large-scale problems see [LM99, Kan01]
and references therein. First, we briefly describe the general
scheme and describe in Section 4.1 how to approximate the
required second-order information in an efficient and robust
way.
By listing the coordinates of all vertices we identify a
mesh with a point in Rn where n equals three times the
number of vertices in the mesh. Let x0 ∈ Rn be the point
representing the initial mesh. Then the feasible set Ωx0 ,ε is
the n-dimensional cube with edge length ε and midpoint x0 .
Figure 5: The bunny model (70k triangles) is shown on The projection P of a point x in Rn onto Ωx0 ,ε can be com-
the left and after unconstrained minimization of the discrete puted by projecting each coordinate xi of x onto the interval
bending energy on the right. The zoom shows the difference [x0i − ε, x0i + ε], where x0i is the i-th coordinate of x0 . During
in size of the triangles corresponing to the region around an the minimization process we search for (usually non-unique)
ear. This demonstrates the robustness of the discrete energy. minima along projected rays. The idea is that whenever a
bound is encountered, the direction of the ray is bent such

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

Figure 6: Noise removal from a range image of a part of a Neptune statue (height ~10 cm) with a maximum deviation tolerance
of 0.04 mm.

that the ray remains in the feasible set. The projected ray where λ < 1 is a constant. In our experiments we always set
starting at a point x with initial direction v is obtained by λ = 0.01. The last term in the equation uses the gradient to
projecting the ray x + t v onto the feasible set, i.e. it is given compute how much decrease of energy we can expect when
by moving in direction yi − xi . The equation guarantees that the
actual choice of yi produces a decrease that is at least within
r(t) = P(x + t v).
a fraction of the estimate which is important to guarantee
This describes a piecewise linear path that, after first hitting rapid decrease of the energy.
a face of the feasible set, leads along the boundary. Note
2. Subspace minimization. The point yi lies in some face of
that for any t this can be evaluated by a simple loop over all
the feasible cube Ωx0 ,ε . In this step we perform a minimiza-
coordinates.
tion step constrained to this face. More specifically: deter-
The set of active constraints for a point x ∈ Ωx0 ,ε is de- mine the active set A(yi ) of yi and compute the reduced Hes-
fined as sian Hr and the reduced gradient gr with respect to the free
  variables. Here reduced means: for all i ∈ A(yi ) remove the
 
A(x) = {i ∈ {1, 2, ..., n} | xi − x0i  = ε}.
i-th column and row from H and the i-th entry from g. Then
For a point away from the boundary the active set is empty, compute the reduced Newton direction vir = Hr−1 gr . The
and for a vertex of the cube Ωx0 ,ε all constraints are active. next position xi+1 is a point on the projected path P(yi + t
Let E : Ωx0 ,ε → R be our energy and let H(x) denote the vir ) that satisfies the condition
Hessian and g(x) the gradient. The Newton direction v(x) at
E(xi+1 ) < E(yi ) (4)
a point x ∈ Ωx0 ,ε is
ensuring a decrease of the energy.
v(x) = −(H(x))−1 g(x).
A local minimum is reached if the gradient either vanishes
The active set method iterates the following two steps. Let or is orthogonal to the boundary.
xi be the current position.
In steps 1 and 2 we search for a good point on a pro-
1. Cauchy step. Compute the gradient direction g(xi ). Find a jected ray r(t). Such a point is found by an iterative proce-
point yi along the projected path P(xi +t g(xi )) that produces dure, which starting from an initial guess t = t 0 either mono-
a sufficient reduction of energy; i.e. that fulfills tonically increases or monotonically decreases the value of
  t. It is increasing if the guessed point r(t 0 ) fulfills the de-
E(yi ) < E(xi ) − λ g(xi ), yi − xi , (3) scent condition (eq. (3) in step 1 and eq. (4) in step 2) or

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

otherwise decreasing. In each iteration the value of t is mul- essentially depends on the choice of a good preconditioner.
tiplied by a factor of 2 (increasing case) or 0.5 (decreasing We compute a sparse Cholesky factorization of S only once
case). The iteration terminates if the descent condition is no as a preprocessing step and use the factorization in each iter-
longer fulfilled (increasing case) or if it is fulfilled (decreas- ation to build a constraint preconditioner [NW06] for solv-
ing case). In the case of an increasing sequence the last value ing the reduced system (5).
satisfying the descent condition is used. In each Cauchy step
(respectively Newton step) we use the result of the previous
iteration as an initial guess for t. 5. Experimental Results
We have tested our method on laser-scanned real-world
4.1. Approximation of the Hessian models, except for the pelvis model shown in Figure 2 that
has been extracted from computed tomography data. No ar-
Since the Hessian of the discrete bending energy is not nec- tificial noise has been added to the models, we tested the
essarily positive definite, there is no guaranty that the New- method with the noise inherent to the scanned data. The only
ton direction is indeed a descent direction. One way to deal exceptions are Figures 7 and 8 where artificial noise has been
with this issue is to replace the Hessian by a positive definite added to the models in order to have a goal surface for the
approximation. Note that we only modify the search direc- comparison of methods.
tion but still minimize the same energy. This technique is
used in inexact Newton methods. Noise removal from range images is shown in Figures 3
and 6. These models have a regular quad connectivity which
To approximate the Hessian of the bending energy we use
we triangulated in order to get planar faces. The two range
the Hessian of the thin plate energy with the initial surface as
images differ in size and resolution: the image of the Caesar
parameter domain. This matrix has the form S M −1 S, where
model has 190 k triangles and a height of 30 cm whereas the
S is the usual cotan matrix [PP93, DMSB99], and M con-
Neptune model has 270 k triangles and a height of 10 cm.
tains the masses; e.g. M is a diagonal matrix containing the
Accordingly, we specified a smaller value for the maximum
Voronoi areas. Since the Laplace matrix S has a kernel con-
deviation tolerance for Neptune than for Caesar, 0.04 mm
sisting of the constant functions we add the constant value
for Neptune and 0.1 mm for Caesar. These values are much
0.1 to all diagonal entries of S. The resulting approxima-
smaller then the size of features like the eyelids or wrinkles,
tion of the Hessian is positive definite, can be written as the
which are preserved. The third image of Figure 3 shows the
square of a matrix, and decouples the x, y, and z coordinates.
smoothed Caesar mesh colored by the distance of the ini-
Therefore the linear systems that need to be solved have bet-
tial (noisy) to the smoothed surface. The colors seem to be
ter condition (the condition number is only the square root of
randomly distributed, which indicates that mainly noise has
the original), higher sparsity and lower dimension. This al-
been removed and little structured deviation, like shrinkage
lows the approximate Newton direction to be computed and,
of features, took place. The Figures 1 and 4 show models
in effect, the method to be applied to larger models. This is
with clean connectivity and filed holes. The Chinese lion
demonstrated on the Chinese lion model with 1.3 m triangles
model has 1.3 m triangles and a height of 10 cm and the
in Figure 1.
blade has 390 k triangles and measures about one meter in
A related approximation of the Hessian of the bending height. We used 0.1 mm maximum deviation tolerance for
energy has been proposed and used to accelerate the integra- the Chinese lion and 1 mm for the blade.
tion of Willmore flow in [WBH∗ 07]. A main difference is
The pelvis model (Figure 2) suffers from artifacts caused
that the approximate Hessian we use is a product of square
by a rudimentary volume-extraction method. The ε maxi-
matrices, whereas their approximation is a product of non-
mum deviation for this model is 1 mm which suffices to pro-
square matrices.
duce a smooth model.
Efficiently solving the linear system. We need to solve the
We compare our method to the feature-preserving
linear system
anisotropic diffusion as described in [HP04] on the armadillo
(S M −1 S)r vr = gr , (5) model in Figure 8. Despite the larger amount of noise used
in this example, our method produces a result that comes
where g is the gradient of the discrete bending energy eq. (1).
close to the original surface. The anisotropic diffusion fo-
Note that we solve only the reduced system, indicated by
cusses on preserving the features and even enhances them;
the subindex r. The variables in the active set remain fixed; e.g. the teeth are sharper than in the original model. On the
the corresponding rows and columns are removed from the
other hand the noise is also preserved for a longer time. At
system. It is not necessary to completely solve the system;
the instant when the noise is removed, the non-feature re-
approximating the solution by performing only a few itera- gions are already oversmoothed. For the goal of reproducing
tions of preconditioned conjugate gradients is usually more
the original shape, our method produces better results.
efficient for large-scale problems. These type of methods are
called Newton-CG methods. The performance of the method We compare our method to the unconstrained gradient

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f)

Figure 7: Comparison of the constrained optimization and the unconstrained gradient flow of the bending energy on the Caesar
model (a). The model has been artificially corrupted by random noise with 0.2 mm maximum deviation (b), where the height
of the object is 30 cm. The constrained optimization (c) keeps all vertices within 0.2 mm distance. The bottom row shows the
gradient flow at different times. Vertices that leave the 0.2 mm distance are colored red. The first vertices leave the 0.2 mm
distance (d). When the same bending energy is reached (e) the maximum distance is 2 mm and shrinkage effects appear for
example at the eyelids. Further time steps (f) induce more shrinkage.

flow of the bending energy on the Caesar model in Fig- of a volume grid. Our method offers different improvements
ure 7. The model has been corrupted by random noise with a over this scheme. Shrouds is only defined for meshes that
maximal deviation of 0.2 mm, where the height of the object enclose a volume, whereas our method can process arbitrary
is 30 cm. The constrained optimization (top row right) keeps surface meshes with or without boundary. The maximum de-
all vertices within 0.2 mm distance to the noisy mesh. The viation used for denoising scan data in our examples is very
bottom row shows snapshots of the unconstrained evolution. small; e.g. 0.1 mm for an object that has a bounding box with
Vertices that leave the 0.2 mm distance are colored red. The edge length 100 mm. This means that the volume grid that
first image shows the moment when the first vertices leave Shrouds generates would have about 109 grid points. The
the 0.2 mm distance. The model is still very noisy. When mesh that Shrouds extracts from the volume grid would be
the fairness energy equals the fairness energy of the surface much larger then the initial mesh. Additionally, since the op-
produced by the constrained optimization, the maximum dis- timization method uses a variant of an explicit gradient de-
tance is already 2 mm and shrinkage effects appear in regions scent, one expects a large number of iterations.
with high curvature, e.g. at the eyelids. Further time steps in-
duce more shrinkage. Optimization procedure. The active set Newton scheme
produces a rapid decrease of energy. All presented exam-
Shrouds [NGH∗ 03] allows the smoothing of surface ples, including the 1.3 m triangles Chinese lion model, were
meshes with spatial constraint that are defined with the help stopped after 10-25 iterations. The most time-consuming op-

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Figure 8: On the armadillo model (a) that has been artificially corrupted with random noise (b) a comparison of our method (c)
with feature preserving anisotropic diffusion (d) is shown. The anisotropic flow sharpens features, but regarding the reproduction
of the original model the result of our method is much closer.

eration in each iteration is the computation of the Newton Model #T


Max. Tol. Newton Exp. Gradient
direction, which requires solving a linear system. In compar- in mm #iter cost (s) #iter cost (s)
Caesar 190 k 0.1 20 103 95 172
ison to this, the procedure that finds the new position along
Caesar 190 k 0.3 20 101 >500 >850
a projected ray r(t) is fast. Blade 390 k 1 15 216 90 364
An alternative optimization procedure to the proposed Blade 390 k 3 15 209 >500 >2000
Blade* 100 k 1 15 48 250 278
Newton scheme would be an explicit projected gradient de-
scent; i.e. the subspace minimization step is skipped. A ben- Table 1: A comparison of running times of the proposed
efit of this is that one does not need to compute the New- Newton scheme and an explicit gradient descent is shown.
ton direction, which simplifies the implementation and de- Different values of the maximum deviation tolerance were
creases the computational cost of an iteration. On the other tested on the Caesar and the blade model. The procedures
hand, it is well known that for this type of problem an ex- were stopped at equal values of the energy. The last row
plicit gradient descent usually requires a large number of shows running times of the methods on an irregular mesh
steps. The comparison shown in Table 1 demonstrates that generated by simplifying the blade model.
the explicit gradient descent is only efficient if the mesh has
nicely shaped triangles and the deviation tolerance is very to generate a mesh before being able to apply the method
small; whereas the Newton scheme performs well on all the to scan data. We are interested in developing strategies to
examples. estimate the accuracy of the scan, which would help to auto-
mate the smoothing process. Moreover we experiment with
An implicit gradient descent can handle irregular meshes weighted maximum deviation measures.
and larger steps, but the computation of an implicit step itself
Acknowledgements. This work was supported by the DFG Re-
requires solving a nonlinear equation, cp. [WBH∗ 07]. Even
search Center M ATHEON ”Mathematics for Key Technologies” in
if the equation is linearized (semi-implicit scheme) the cost
Berlin. We would like to thank Max Wardetzky for valuable discus-
of computing the gradient direction is comparable to the cost
sions, Hans Lamecker for generating the pelvis model, and Miriam
of computing the Newton direction.
Kabaum for her support. The models are courtesy of Aim@Shape
Future work. Future work addresses extending the ap- Project, IMATI, INRIA, Zuse Institute Berlin, and Stanford Univer-
proach to point cloud surfaces. This would remove the need sity.

c The Eurographics Association 2007.



K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier / Constraint-based fairing of surface meshes

References [Kan01] K ANZOW C.: An active set-type newton method for con-
strained nonlinear systems. In Complementarity: Applications,
[Ale02] A LEXA M.: Wiener filtering of meshes. In Proceedings
Algorithms and Extensions (2001), Ferris M., Mangasarian O.,
of the Shape Modeling International (2002), IEEE Computer So-
Pang J.-S., (Eds.), Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 179–200.
ciety, pp. 51–57.
[LBH∗ 01] L IU X., BAO H., H ENG P., W ONG T., P ENG Q.:
[BMF03] B RIDSON R., M ARINO S., F EDKIW R.: Simulation of
Constrained fairing for meshes. Computer Graphics Forum 20
clothing with folds and wrinkles. In Proceedings of the ACM
(2001), 115–122.
SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation
[LM99] L IN C.-J., M ORÉ J. J.: Newton’s method for large
(2003), pp. 28–36.
bound-constrained optimization problems. SIAM Journal on Op-
[BO03] B ELYAEV A., O HTAKE Y.: A comparison of mesh
timization 9, 4 (1999), 1100–1127.
smoothing methods. In Proceedings of the Israel-Korea Bi-
[MS92] M ORETON H. P., S ÉQUIN C. H.: Functional optimiza-
National Conference on Geometric Modeling and Computer
tion for fair surface design. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH
Graphics (2003), pp. 83–87.
[Bob05] B OBENKO A. I.: A conformal energy for simplicial sur- (1992), pp. 167–176.
[NGH∗ 03] N IELSON G. M., G RAF G., H OLMES R., H UANG
faces. Combinatorial and Computational Geometry (2005), 133–
A., P HIELIPP M.: Shrouds: Optimal separating surfaces for enu-
143.
[BS05] B OBENKO A. I., S CHRÖDER P.: Discrete Willmore flow. merated volumes. In Symposium on Visualization (2003), Euro-
In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Sympo- graphics Association.
[NISA06] N EALEN A., I GARASHI T., S ORKINE O., A LEXA
sium on Geometry Processing (2005), pp. 101–110.
[BW98] BARAFF D., W ITKIN A.: Large steps in cloth simula- M.: Laplacian mesh optimization. In Proceedings of ACM
tion. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (1998), pp. 43–54. GRAPHITE (2006), pp. 381–389.
[BX03] BAJAJ C., X U G.: Anisotropic diffusion on surfaces and [NW06] N OCEDAL J., W RIGHT S. J.: Numerical Optimization
functions on surfaces. ACM Transactions on Graphics 22 (2003), (2nd edition). Springer Series in Operations Research. Springer-
4–32. Verlag, New York, NY, 2006.
[CDD∗ 04] C LARENZ U., D IEWALD U., D ZIUK G., RUMPF M., [PM87] P ERONA P., M ALIK J.: Scale space and edge detection
RUSU R.: A finite element method for surface restoration with using anisotropic diffusion. IEEE Computer Society Workshop
smooth boundary conditions. Computer Aided Geometric Design on Computer Vision (1987).
21, 5 (2004), 427–445. [PP93] P INKALL U., P OLTHIER K.: Computing discrete minimal
[CDR00] C LARENZ U., D IEWALD U., RUMPF M.: Anisotropic surfaces and their conjugates. Experim. Math. 2, 1 (1993), 15–36.
geometric diffusion in surface processing. Proceedings of IEEE [PSZ01] P ENG J., S TRELA V., Z ORIN D.: A simple algorithm
Visualization (2000), 397–405. for surface denoising. Proceedings of IEEE Visualization (2001).
[CSM03] C OHEN -S TEINER D., M ORVAN J.-M.: Restricted De- [SCO04] S ORKINE O., C OHEN -O R D.: Least-squares meshes.
launay triangulations and normal cycles. Proceedings of the ACM In Proceedings of Shape Modeling International (2004), IEEE
Symposium on Computational Geometry (2003), 237–246. Computer Society Press, pp. 191–199.
[Del01] D ELINGETTE H.: On smoothness measures of active [SK00] S CHNEIDER R., K OBBELT L.: Generating fair meshes
contours and surfaces. In Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop with G1 boundary conditions. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH
on Variational and Level Set Methods (Washington, DC, USA, (2000), 247–256.
2001), IEEE Computer Society. [Tau95] TAUBIN G.: A signal processing approach to fair surface
[DMSB99] D ESBRUN M., M EYER M., S CHRÖDER P., BARR design. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (1995).
A. H.: Implicit fairing of irregular meshes using diffusion and [TM98] T OMASI C., M ANDUCHI R.: Bilateral filtering for gray
curvature flow. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (1999), 317– and color images. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Con-
324. ference on Computer Vision (1998), pp. 839–846.
[FDCO03] F LEISHMAN S., D RORI I., C OHEN -O R D.: Bilateral [TWBO02] TASDIZEN T., W HITAKER R., B URCHARD P., O S -
mesh denoising. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (2003), 950– HER S.: Geometric surface smoothing via anisotropic diffusion
953. of normals. Preceedings of IEEE Visualization (2002), 125–132.
[GHDS03] G RINSPUN E., H IRANI A., D ESBRUN M., [VVR06] V OLODINE T., VANDERSTRAETEN D., ROOSE D.:
S CHRÖDER P.: Discrete shells. In Proceedings of the ACM Smoothing of meshes and point clouds using weighted geometry-
SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation aware bases. In Proceedings of Geometric Modeling and Pro-
(2003), pp. 62–67. cessing (2006), pp. 687–693.
[Gib98] G IBSON S. F. F.: Constrained elastic surface nets: Gen- [WBH∗ 07] WARDETZKY M., B ERGOU M., H ARMON D.,
erating smooth surfaces from binary segmented data. In Medical Z ORIN D., G RINSPUN E.: Discrete quadratic curvature energies.
Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - MIC- to appear in Computer Aided Geometric Design (2007).
CAI (1998), Wells W. M., Colchester A. C. F., Delp S. L., (Eds.), [WN01] W ESTGAARD G., N OWACKI H.: A process for surface
Springer, pp. 888–898. fairing in irregular meshes. Computer Aided Geometric Design
[GP01] G ROSS M., PAULY M.: Spectral processing of point- 18, 7 (2001), 619–638.
sampled geometry. Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH (2001), [YB02] Y OSHIZAWA S., B ELYAEV A. G.: Fair triangle mesh
379–386. generation with discrete elastica. In Proceedings of Geomet-
[HP04] H ILDEBRANDT K., P OLTHIER K.: Anisotropic filtering ric Modeling and Processing (2002), IEEE Computer Society,
of non-linear surface features. Computer Graphics Forum, 23(3) pp. 119–123.
(2004), 391–400. [YBS06] Y OSHIZAWA S., B ELYAEV A., S EIDEL H.-P.: Smooth-
[JDD03] J ONES T. R., D URAND F., D ESBRUN M.: Non- ing by example: Mesh denoising by averaging with similarity-
iterative, feature-preserving mesh smoothing. Proceedings of based weights. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Confer-
ACM SIGGRAPH (2003). ence on Shape Modeling and Applications (2006), IEEE.

c The Eurographics Association 2007.




You might also like