Surface matching using consistent pants decomposition

Surface matching is fundamental to shape computing and various downstream applications. This paper develops a powerful pants decomposition framework for computing maps between surfaces with arbitrary topologies. We first conduct pants decomposition on both surfaces to segment them into consistent sets of pants patches (here a pants patch is intuitively defined as a genus-zero surface with three boundaries). Then we compose global mapping between two surfaces by using harmonic maps of corresponding patches. This framework has several key advantages over existing state-of-the-art techniques. First, the surface decomposition is automatic and general. It can automatically construct mappings for surfaces with the same but complicated topology, and the result is guaranteed to be one-to-one continuous. Second, the mapping framework is very flexible and powerful. Not only topology and geometry, but also the semantics can be easily integrated into this framework with little user involvement. S...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SMA
• Authors: Xin Li, Xianfeng Gu, Hong Qin
• Keywords: Decomposition, Pants, SMA 2008, Solid Modeling, Surfaces