Tracking Surfaces with Evolving Topology

Copyright © 2014 Hao Li

We present a method for recovering a temporally coherent, deforming triangle mesh with arbitrarily changing topology from an incoherent sequence of static closed surfaces. We solve this problem using the surface geometry alone, without any prior information like surface templates or velocity fields. Our system combines a proven strategy for triangle mesh improvement, a robust multi-resolution non-rigid registration routine, and a reliable technique for changing surface mesh topology. We also introduce a novel topological constraint enforcement algorithm to ensure that the output and input always have similar topology. We apply our technique to a series of diverse input data from video reconstructions, physics simulations, and artistic morphs. The structured output of our algorithm allows us to efficiently track information like colors and displacement maps, recover velocity information, and solve PDEs on the mesh as a post process.

PAPER VIDEO

TRACKING SURFACES WITH EVOLVING TOPOLOGY

Morten Bojsen-Hansen, Hao Li, Chris Wojtan

ACM Transactions on Graphics, Proceedings of the 39th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition 2012, 08/2012 – SIGGRAPH 2012

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