This paper describes a method for computing surface parameterizations that map infinitesimal axis-aligned squares in the plane to infinitesimal rectangles on the surface. Such rectangular parameterizations are needed for a broad range of tasks, from physical simulation to geometric modeling to computational fabrication. Our main contribution is a novel strategy for constructing frame fields that are perfectly orthogonal and exactly integrable, in the limit of mesh refinement. In contrast to past strategies for achieving integrability, we obtain maps that are less distorted and better preserve target field directions. The method supports user-defined distortion measures, sharp feature alignment, prescribed or automatic cone singularities, and direct control over boundary behavior (e.g., sizing or aspect ratio). By quantizing and contouring these maps we obtain high-quality anisotropic quad meshes, even without element-based optimization. Empirically, we outperform state-of-the-art research and commercial mesh generation algorithms in terms of element quality, accuracy, and asymptotic convergence rate in end-to-end simulation tasks, are competitive with the widely-used ZBrush package for automatic retopology, and provide Chebyshev nets of superior quality to methods specifically tailored to digital fabrication.

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for computing conformal deformations in ℝ 3 while minimizing curvature-based energies. Curvature-based energies serve as fundamental tools in geometry processing, essential for tasks such as surface fairing, deformation, and approximation using developable or cone metric surfaces. However, accurately computing the geometric embedding, especially for the latter, has been a challenging endeavor. The complexity arises from inherent numerical instabilities in curvature estimation and the intricate nature of differentiating these energies. To address these challenges, we concentrate on conformal deformations, leveraging the curvature tensor as the primary variable in our model. This strategic choice renders curvature-based energies easily applicable, mitigating previous manipulation difficulties. Our key contribution lies in identifying a previously unknown integrability condition that establishes a connection between conformal deformations and changes in curvature. We use this insight to deform surfaces of arbitrary genus, aiming to minimize bending energies or prescribe Gaussian curvature while sticking to positional constraints.

We introduce a novel data-driven approach aimed at designing high-quality shape deformations based on a coarse localized input signal. Unlike previous data-driven methods that require a global shape encoding, we observe that detail-preserving deformations can be estimated reliably without any global context in certain scenarios. Building on this intuition, we leverage Jacobians defined in a one-ring neighborhood as a coarse representation of the deformation. Using this as the input to our neural network, we apply a series of MLPs combined with feature smoothing to learn the Jacobian corresponding to the detail-preserving deformation, from which the embedding is recovered by the standard Poisson solve. Crucially, by removing the dependence on a global encoding, every point becomes a training example, making the supervision particularly lightweight. Moreover, when trained on a class of shapes, our approach demonstrates remarkable generalization across different object categories. Equipped with this novel network, we explore three main tasks: refining an approximate shape correspondence, unsupervised deformation and mapping, and shape editing. Our code is made available at https://github.com/sentient07/LJN.

This article introduces a new representation of surface global parametrization based on Cartan’s method of moving frames . We show that a system of structure equations , characterizing the local coordinates changes with respect to a local frame system, completely characterizes the set of possible cone parametrizations. The discretization of this system provably provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a valid mapping. We are able to derive a versatile algorithm for surface parametrization, allowing feature constraints and singularities. As the first structure equation is independent of the global coordinate system, we do not require prior knowledge of cuts or cone positions. So, a single non-linear least-square problem is enough to place quantized cones while minimizing a given distortion energy. We are therefore able to take full advantage of the link between the parametrization geometry and the topology of its cone metric to solve challenging constrained parametrization problems.

State-of-the-art fully intrinsic network for non-rigid shape matching are unable to disambiguate between shape inner symmetries. Meanwhile, recent advances in the functional map framework allow to enforce orientation preservation using a functional representation for tangent vector field transfer, through so-called complex functional maps. Using this representation, we propose a new deep learning approach to learn orientation-aware features in afully unsupervised setting. Our architecture is built on DiffusionNet, which makes our method robust to discretization changes, while adding a vector-field-based loss, which promotes orientation preservation without using (often unstable) extrinsic descriptors. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/nicolasdonati/DUO-FM.

Abstract In this paper, we introduce complex functional maps, which extend the functional map framework to conformal maps between tangent vector fields on surfaces. A key property of these maps is theirorientation awareness. More specifically, we demonstrate that unlike regular functional maps that linkfunctional spacesof two manifolds, our complex functional maps establish a link betweenoriented tangent bundles, thus permitting robust and efficient transfer of tangent vector fields. By first endowing and then exploiting the tangent bundle of each shape with a complex structure, the resulting operations become naturally orientation‐aware, thus favouringorientation and angle preserving correspondenceacross shapes, without relying on descriptors or extra regularization. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, we demonstrate how these objects enable several practical applications within the functional map framework. We show that functional maps and their complex counterparts can be estimated jointly to promote orientation preservation, regularizing pipelines that previously suffered from orientation‐reversing symmetry errors.

A basic challenge in field-guided hexahedral meshing is to find a spatially-varying frame that is adapted to the domain geometry and is continuous up to symmetries of the cube. We introduce a fundamentally new representation of such 3D cross fields based on Cartan's method of moving frames. Our key observation is that cross fields and ordinary frame fields are locally characterized by identical conditions on their Darboux derivative. Hence, by using derivatives as the principal representation (and only later recovering the field itself), one avoids the need to explicitly account for symmetry during optimization. At the discrete level, derivatives are encoded by skew-symmetric matrices associated with the edges of a tetrahedral mesh; these matrices encode arbitrarily large rotations along each edge, and can robustly capture singular behavior even on coarse meshes. We apply this representation to compute 3D cross fields that are as smooth as possible everywhere but on a prescribed network of singular curves---since these fields are adapted to curve tangents, they can be directly used as input for field-guided mesh generation algorithms. Optimization amounts to an easy nonlinear least squares problem that behaves like a convex program in the sense that it always appears to produce the same result, independent of initialization. We study the numerical behavior of this procedure, and perform some preliminary experiments with mesh generation.

In this article, we present a novel representation for deformation fields of 3D shapes, by considering the induced changes in the underlying metric. In particular, our approach allows one to represent a deformation field in a coordinate-free way as a linear operator acting on real-valued functions defined on the shape. Such a representation provides both a way to relate deformation fields to other classical functional operators and enables analysis and processing of deformation fields using standard linear-algebraic tools. This opens the door to a wide variety of applications such as explicitly adding extrinsic information into the computation of functional maps, intrinsic shape symmetrization, joint deformation design through precise control of metric distortion, and coordinate-free deformation transfer without requiring pointwise correspondences. Our method is applicable to both surface and volumetric shape representations and we guarantee the equivalence between the operator-based and standard deformation field representation under mild genericity conditions in the discrete setting. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by comparing it with existing techniques and show how our representation provides a powerful toolbox for a wide variety of challenging problems.

We propose a novel technique for computing consistent cross fields on a pair of triangle meshes given an input correspondence, which we use as guiding fields for approximately consistent quadrangulations. Unlike the majority of existing methods our approach does not assume that the meshes share the same connectivity or even have the same number of vertices, and furthermore does not place any restrictions on the topology (genus) of the shapes. Importantly, our method is robust with respect to small perturbations of the given correspondence, as it only relies on the transportation of real-valued functions and thus avoids the costly and error-prone estimation of the map differential. Key to this robustness is a novel formulation, which relies on the previously-proposed notion of power vectors , and we show how consistency can be enforced without pre-alignment of local basis frames, in which these power vectors are computed. We demonstrate that using the same formulation we can both compute a quadrangulation that would respect a given symmetry on the same shape or a map across a pair of shapes. We provide quantitative and qualitative comparison of our method with several baselines and show that it both provides more accurate results and allows to handle more general cases than existing techniques.

We propose a novel way to capture and characterize distortion between pairs of shapes by extending the recently proposed framework of shape differences built on functional maps. We modify the original definition of shape differences slightly and prove that after this change, the discrete metric is fully encoded in two shape difference operators and can be recovered by solving two linear systems of equations. Then we introduce an extension of the shape difference operators using offset surfaces to capture extrinsic or embedding-dependent distortion, complementing the purely intrinsic nature of the original shape differences. Finally, we demonstrate that a set of four operators is complete, capturing intrinsic and extrinsic structure and fully encoding a shape up to rigid motion in both discrete and continuous settings. We highlight the usefulness of our constructions by showing the complementary nature of our extrinsic shape differences in capturing distortion ignored by previous approaches. We additionally provide examples where we recover local shape structure from the shape difference operators, suggesting shape editing and analysis tools based on manipulating shape differences.

Abstract We present a new method for non‐rigid shape matching designed to enforce continuity of the resulting correspondence. Our method is based on the recently proposed functional map representation, which allows efficient manipulation and inference but often fails to provide a continuous point‐to‐point mapping. We address this problem by exploiting the connection between the operator representation of mappings and flows of vector fields. In particular, starting from an arbitrary continuous map between two surfaces we find an optimal flow that makes the final correspondence operator as close as possible to the initial functional map. Our method also helps to address the symmetric ambiguity problem inherent in many intrinsic correspondence methods when matching symmetric shapes. We provide practical and theoretical results showing that our method can be used to obtain an orientation preserving or reversing map starting from a functional map that represents the mixture of the two. We also show how this method can be used to improve the quality of maps produced by existing shape matching methods, and compare the resulting map's continuity with results obtained by other operator‐based techniques.