RBF Dipole Surface Evolution

—The level set method can implement a wide variety of shape modeling operations (e.g. offsetting, skeletonization, morphing, blending, smoothing, sharpening, embossing, denoising, sculpting, growing, texturing and fitting) simply by specifying a corresponding speed function that controls the growth of an evolving voxel isosurface. The problem is that the basic level set method is implemented on a fixed resolution grid, which limits the utility of these shape modeling operations. We instead represent surfaces with a collection of radial basis function dipole pairs, and derive the motion of these dipoles to implement a surface propagation similar to the level set method but on a smooth, arbitrary resoluton model. We demonstrate the utility of this approach with new level set methods for surface fitting, blending and center redistribution for RBF dipole models. Keywords—implicit surface; level set; radial basis function; particle system; surface fitting

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SMI
• Authors: Yuntao Jia, Xinlai Ni, Eric Lorimer, Michael Mullan, Ross T. Whitaker, John C. Hart
• Keywords: Dipole, Image Analysis, Radial Basis Function, Shape Modeling Operations, SMI 2010