Computing Stable and Compact Representation of Medial Axis

When: Wednesday, September 24, 
2014
Where: PGH 563
Time: 3:30 PM

Speaker: Dr. Wenping Wang, University of Hong Kong

Host: Prof. Guoning Chen

As a complete shape description, the medial axis of a geometric shape possesses a number of favorable properties--it encodes symmetry, local thickness and structural components of the shape it represents. Consequently, the medial axis has been studied extensively in shape modeling and analysis since its introduction by Blum in 1960s. However, the practical application of the medial axis is hindered by its notorious instability and lack of compact representation; that is, a primitive medial axis without proper processing is often represented as a dense discrete mesh with many spurious branches and a large number of vertices. In this talk I shall represent some recent studies on computing stable and compact representations of the medial axes of 2D and 3D shapes. Specifically, techniques from mesh simplification, spline fitting, and optimal point sampling will be employed to compute a medial axis without spurious branches and represented by a small number of mesh vertices, while meeting specified approximation accuracy.

Bio:

Wenping Wang is Professor and Head of Computer Science Department at The University of Hong Kong.  His research covers computer graphics, visualization, and geometric computing. He has recently focused on mesh generation and polyhedral surface modeling for architectural design. He is journal associate editor of Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD), Computers & Graphics (CAG), Computer Graphics Forum (CGF), and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (2008-2012). He is program chair of Pacific Graphics 2003, ACM Symposium on Physical and Solid Modeling (SPM) 2006, and International Conference on Shape Modeling (SMI) 2009, and conference chair of Pacific Graphics 2012, ACM Symposium on Physical and Solid Modeling (SPM) 2013, and SIGGRAPH Asia 2013.