Browsing by Author "Hormann, Kai"

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    Maximum Likelihood Coordinates
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Chang, Qingjun; Deng, Chongyang; Hormann, Kai; Memari, Pooran; Solomon, Justin
    Any point inside a d-dimensional simplex can be expressed in a unique way as a convex combination of the simplex's vertices, and the coefficients of this combination are called the barycentric coordinates of the point. The idea of barycentric coordinates extends to general polytopes with n vertices, but they are no longer unique if n>d+1. Several constructions of such generalized barycentric coordinates have been proposed, in particular for polygons and polyhedra, but most approaches cannot guarantee the non-negativity of the coordinates, which is important for applications like image warping and mesh deformation. We present a novel construction of non-negative and smooth generalized barycentric coordinates for arbitrary simple polygons, which extends to higher dimensions and can include isolated interior points. Our approach is inspired by maximum entropy coordinates, as it also uses a statistical model to define coordinates for convex polygons, but our generalization to non-convex shapes is different and based instead on the project-and-smooth idea of iterative coordinates. We show that our coordinates and their gradients can be evaluated efficiently and provide several examples that illustrate their advantages over previous constructions.
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    On Landmark Distances in Polygons
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Gotsman, Craig; Hormann, Kai; Digne, Julie and Crane, Keenan
    We study the landmark distance function between two points in a simply connected planar polygon. We show that if the polygon vertices are used as landmarks, then the resulting landmark distance function to any given point in the polygon has a maximum principle and also does not contain local minima. The latter implies that a path between any two points in the polygon may be generated by steepest descent on this distance without getting ''stuck'' at a local minimum. Furthermore, if landmarks are increasingly added along polygon edges, the steepest descent path converges to the minimal geodesic path. Therefore, the landmark distance can be used, on the one hand in robotic navigation for routing autonomous agents along close-to-shortest paths and on the other for efficiently computing approximate geodesic distances between any two domain points, a property which may be useful in an extension of our work to surfaces in 3D. In the discrete setting, the steepest descent strategy becomes a greedy routing algorithm along the edges of a triangulation of the interior of the polygon, and our experiments indicate that this discrete landmark routing always delivers (i.e., does not get stuck) on ''nice'' triangulations.