Tangential Distance Fields for Mesh Silhouette Problems
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Date
2009
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
We consider a tangent-space representation of surfaces that maps each point on a surface to the tangent plane of the surface at that point. Such representations are known to facilitate the solution of several visibility problems, in particular, those involving silhouette analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of distance fields for a given surface defined by its tangent planes. At each point in space, we assign a scalar value which is a weighted sum of distances to these tangent planes. We call the resulting scalar field a tangential distance field (TDF). When applied to triangle mesh models, the tangent planes become supporting planes of the mesh triangles. The weighting scheme used to construct a TDF for a given mesh and the way the TDF is utilized can be closely tailored to a specific application. At the same time, the TDFs are continuous, lending themselves to standard optimization techniques such as greedy local search, thus leading to efficient algorithms. In this paper, we use four applications to illustrate the benefit of using TDFs: multi-origin silhouette extraction in Hough space, silhouette-based view point selection, camera path planning and light source placement.
Description
@article{10.1111:j.1467-8659.2008.01306.x,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Tangential Distance Fields for Mesh Silhouette Problems}},
author = {Olson, M. and Zhang, H.},
year = {2009},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2008.01306.x}
}