Abstract We present a physically‐informed segmentation pipeline for producing fabric formwork for the casting and molding of arbitrary 3D objects. Fabric formworks are molds made by stitching together patches of textile fabric. The mechanical flexibility offered by these molds aids the fabrication of unconventional and complex geometries and allows for greater transportation ease for on‐site fabrication tasks. We employ an isotropic material model to estimate maximal strain directions that result when casting fluid is poured into the formwork. Our physically driven segmentation approach ensures seams and fiber directions align with these maximal strains. Experimental observations indicate that this alignment strategy significantly reduces twisting and shearing artifacts associated with the orthotropic deformation of woven fabrics. Aligning seams with strain directions further limits deformation of the formwork, improving fidelity to the input model. Moreover, our segmentation improves upon that of [ZFS*19] by promoting smoother seams and quad‐like patches, reducing the time and expertise needed to construct the formwork. We validate the efficacy of our pipeline by fabricating and simulating shapes of varying complexity, showing superior geometric reconstruction and fabrication ease.

We present an algorithm for global knit structure planning that leverages a generalization of power diagrams to triangulated surfaces. This generalization is based on modified geodesic heat kernels and is used to quantize the curl measure of a normalized knitting time function gradient. Knit singularity positions are optimized jointly in a global fashion via an iterative Lloyd-type algorithm, leading to faster and more optimal placement of singularities than prior work, allowing for practical creation of denser knit graphs. In this denser setting, we present singularity ordering constraints that more robustly achieve helix-free knit graphs. The speed and robustness of the method is demonstrated via a diverse array of knits, and a virtual gallery of helix-free knit graphs. We also provide further demonstration of user constraints for knit singularity masking, level set alignment constraints, and apparent seam placement via curl boosting.

Trajectory inference seeks to recover the temporal dynamics of a population from snapshots of its (uncoupled) temporal marginals, i.e. where observed particles are \emph{not} tracked over time. Prior works addressed this challenging problem under a stochastic differential equation (SDE) model with a gradient-driven drift in the observed space, introducing a minimum entropy estimator relative to the Wiener measure and a practical grid-free mean-field Langevin (MFL) algorithm using Schr\"odinger bridges. Motivated by the success of observable state space models in the traditional paired trajectory inference problem (e.g. target tracking), we extend the above framework to a class of latent SDEs in the form of \emph{observable state space models}. In this setting, we use partial observations to infer trajectories in the latent space under a specified dynamics model (e.g. the constant velocity/acceleration models from target tracking). We introduce the PO-MFL algorithm to solve this latent trajectory inference problem and provide theoretical guarantees to the partially observed setting. Experiments validate the robustness of our method and the exponential convergence of the MFL dynamics, and demonstrate significant outperformance over the latent-free baseline in key scenarios.

We propose a novel method (FaCE) for normal estimation of unoriented point clouds and VR ribbon sketches that leverages a modeling of the Faraday cage effect. Input points, or a sampling of the ribbons, form a conductive cage and shield the interior from external fields. The gradient of the maximum field strength over external field scenarios is used to estimate a normal at each input point or ribbon. The electrostatic effect is modeled with a simple Poisson system, accommodating intuitive user-driven sculpting via the specification of point charges and Faraday cage points. On inputs sampled from clean, watertight meshes, our method achieves comparable normal quality to existing methods tailored for this scenario. On inputs containing interior structures and artifacts, our method produces superior surfacing output when combined with Poisson Surface Reconstruction. In the case of ribbon sketches, our method accommodates sparser ribbon input while maintaining an accurate geometry, allowing for greater flexibility in the artistic process. We demonstrate superior performance to an existing approach for surfacing ribbon sketches in this sparse setting.

Abstract Vector sketch software (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape) and touch‐interactive technologies have long aided artists in the creation of resolution‐independent digital drawings that mimic the unconstrained nature of freehand sketches. However, artist intent behind stroke topology is often ambiguous, complicating traditional segmentation tasks such as coloring. For inspiration, we turn to the winding number, a classic geometric property of interest for binary segmentation in the presence of boundary data. Its direct application for multi‐region segmentation poses two main challenges: (1) strokes may not be consistently oriented to best identify perceptually salient regions; (2) for interior strokes there is no “correct” orientation, as either choice better distinguishes one of two neighboring regions. Thus, we form a harmonic feature space from multiple winding number fields and perform segmentation via Voronoi/power diagrams in this domain. Our perspective allows both for automatic fill region detection and for a semi‐automatic framework that naturally incorporates user hints and interactive sculpting of results, unlike competing automatic methods. Our method is agnostic to curve orientation and gracefully handles varying gap sizes in the sketch boundary, outperforming state‐of‐the‐art colorization methods on these “gappy” inputs. Moreover, it inherits the ability of winding numbers to specify “fuzzy” boundaries, leading to simple strategies for color diffusion and single‐parameter‐driven growing and shrinking of regions.

Abstract State‐of‐the‐art methods for line drawing vectorization rely on generated frame fields for robust direction disambiguation, with each of the two axes aligning to different intersecting curve tangents around junctions. However, a common source of topological error for such methods are frame field singularities. To remedy this, we introduce the first frame field optimization framework guaranteed to produce singularity‐free fields aligned to a line drawing. We first perform a convex solve for a roughly‐aligned orthogonal frame field (cross field), and then comb away its internal singularities with an optimal transport–based matching. The resulting topology of the field is strictly maintained with the machinery of discrete trivial connections in a final, non‐convex optimization that allows non‐orthogonality of the field, improving smoothness and tangent alignment. Our frame fields can serve as a drop‐in replacement for frame field optimizations used in previous work, improving the quality of the final vectorizations.

We study a robust alternative to empirical risk minimization called distributionally robust learning (DRL), in which one learns to perform against an adversary who can choose the data distribution from a specified set of distributions. We illustrate a problem with current DRL formulations, which rely on an overly broad definition of allowed distributions for the adversary, leading to learned classifiers that are unable to predict with any confidence. We propose a solution that incorporates unlabeled data into the DRL problem to further constrain the adversary. We show that this new formulation is tractable for stochastic gradient-based optimization and yields a computable guarantee on the future performance of the learned classifier, analogous to -- but tighter than -- guarantees from conventional DRL. We examine the performance of this new formulation on 14 real data sets and find that it often yields effective classifiers with nontrivial performance guarantees in situations where conventional DRL produces neither. Inspired by these results, we extend our DRL formulation to active learning with a novel, distributionally-robust version of the standard model-change heuristic. Our active learning algorithm often achieves superior learning performance to the original heuristic on real data sets.

Line drawing vectorization is a daily task in graphic design, computer animation, and engineering, necessary to convert raster images to a set of curves for editing and geometry processing. Despite recent progress in the area, automatic vectorization tools often produce spurious branches or incorrect connectivity around curve junctions; or smooth out sharp corners. These issues detract from the use of such vectorization tools, both from an aesthetic viewpoint and for feasibility of downstream applications (e.g., automatic coloring or inbetweening). We address these problems by introducing a novel line drawing vectorization algorithm that splits the task into three components: (1) finding keypoints, i.e., curve endpoints, junctions, and sharp corners; (2) extracting drawing topology, i.e., finding connections between keypoints; and (3) computing the geometry of those connections. We compute the optimal geometry of the connecting curves via a novel geometric flow --- PolyVector Flow --- that aligns the curves to the drawing, disambiguating directions around Y-, X-, and T-junctions. We show that our system robustly infers both the geometry and topology of detailed complex drawings. We validate our system both quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrating that our method visually outperforms previous work.

We present a method for designing smooth cross fields on surfaces that automatically align to sharp features of an underlying geometry. Our approach introduces a novel class of energies based on a representation of cross fields in the spherical harmonic basis. We provide theoretical analysis of these energies in the smooth setting, showing that they penalize deviations from surface creases while otherwise promoting intrinsically smooth fields. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to quad meshing and include an extensive benchmark comparing our fields to other automatic approaches for generating feature-aligned cross fields on triangle meshes.

Label switching is a phenomenon arising in mixture model posterior inference that prevents one from meaningfully assessing posterior statistics using standard Monte Carlo procedures. This issue arises due to invariance of the posterior under actions of a group; for example, permuting the ordering of mixture components has no effect on the likelihood. We propose a resolution to label switching that leverages machinery from optimal transport. Our algorithm efficiently computes posterior statistics in the quotient space of the symmetry group. We give conditions under which there is a meaningful solution to label switching and demonstrate advantages over alternative approaches on simulated and real data.

The ability to measure similarity between documents enables intelligent summarization and analysis of large corpora. Past distances between documents suffer from either an inability to incorporate semantic similarities between words or from scalability issues. As an alternative, we introduce hierarchical optimal transport as a meta-distance between documents, where documents are modeled as distributions over topics, which themselves are modeled as distributions over words. We then solve an optimal transport problem on the smaller topic space to compute a similarity score. We give conditions on the topics under which this construction defines a distance, and we relate it to the word mover's distance. We evaluate our technique for k-NN classification and show better interpretability and scalability with comparable performance to current methods at a fraction of the cost.

Abstract We present a fast algorithm for low‐distortion locally injective harmonic mappings of genus 0 triangle meshes with and without cone singularities. The algorithm consists of two portions, a linear subspace analysis and construction, and a nonlinear non‐convex optimization for determination of a mapping within the reduced subspace. The subspace is the space of solutions to the Harmonic Global Parametrization (HGP) linear system [BCW17], and only vertex positions near cones are utilized, decoupling the variable count from the mesh density. A key insight shows how to construct the linear subspace at a cost comparable to that of a linear solve, extracting a very small set of elements from the inverse of the matrix without explicitly calculating it. With a variable count on the order of the number of cones, a tangential alternating projection method [HCW17] and a subsequent Newton optimization [CW17] are used to quickly find a low‐distortion locally injective mapping. This mapping determination is typically much faster than the subspace construction. Experiments demonstrating its speed and efficacy are shown, and we find it to be an order of magnitude faster than HGP and other alternatives.

We present a stochastic algorithm to compute the barycenter of a set of probability distributions under the Wasserstein metric from optimal transport. Unlike previous approaches, our method extends to continuous input distributions and allows the support of the barycenter to be adjusted in each iteration. We tackle the problem without regularization, allowing us to recover a sharp output whose support is contained within the support of the true barycenter. We give examples where our algorithm recovers a more meaningful barycenter than previous work. Our method is versatile and can be extended to applications such as generating super samples from a given distribution and recovering blue noise approximations.

We propose a technique for interpolating between probability distributions on discrete surfaces, based on the theory of optimal transport. Unlike previous attempts that use linear programming, our method is based on a dynamical formulation of quadratic optimal transport proposed for flat domains by Benamou and Brenier [2000], adapted to discrete surfaces. Our structure-preserving construction yields a Riemannian metric on the (finite-dimensional) space of probability distributions on a discrete surface, which translates the so-called Otto calculus to discrete language. From a practical perspective, our technique provides a smooth interpolation between distributions on discrete surfaces with less diffusion than state-of-the-art algorithms involving entropic regularization. Beyond interpolation, we show how our discrete notion of optimal transport extends to other tasks, such as distribution-valued Dirichlet problems and time integration of gradient flows.

Despite high practical demand, algorithmic hexahedral meshing with guarantees on robustness and quality remains unsolved. A promising direction follows the idea of integer-grid maps, which pull back the Cartesian hexahedral grid formed by integer isoplanes from a parametric domain to a surface-conforming hexahedral mesh of the input object. Since directly optimizing for a high-quality integer-grid map is mathematically challenging, the construction is usually split into two steps: (1) generation of a surface-aligned octahedral field and (2) generation of an integer-grid map that best aligns to the octahedral field. The main robustness issue stems from the fact that smooth octahedral fields frequently exhibit singularity graphs that are not appropriate for hexahedral meshing and induce heavily degenerate integer-grid maps. The first contribution of this work is an enumeration of all local configurations that exist in hex meshes with bounded edge valence, and a generalization of the Hopf-Poincaré formula to octahedral fields, leading to necessary local and global conditions for the hex-meshability of an octahedral field in terms of its singularity graph. The second contribution is a novel algorithm to generate octahedral fields with prescribed hex-meshable singularity graphs, which requires the solution of a large nonlinear mixed-integer algebraic system. This algorithm is an important step toward robust automatic hexahedral meshing since it enables the generation of a hex-meshable octahedral field.

Abstract We present a planar harmonic cage‐based deformation method with local injectivity and bounded distortion guarantees, that is significantly faster than state‐of‐the‐art methods with similar guarantees, and allows for real‐time interaction. With a convex proxy for a near‐convex characterization of the bounded distortion harmonic mapping space from [ LW16 ], we utilize a modified alternating projection method (referred to as ATP) to project to this proxy. ATP draws inspiration from [ KABL15 ] and restricts every other projection to lie in a tangential hyperplane. In contrast to [ KABL15 ], our convex setting allows us to show that ATP is provably convergent (and is locally injective). Compared to the standard alternating projection method, it demonstrates superior convergence in fewer iterations, and it is also embarrassingly parallel, allowing for straightforward GPU implementation. Both of these factors combine to result in unprecedented speed. The convergence proof generalizes to arbitrary pairs of intersecting convex sets, suggesting potential use in other applications. Additional theoretical results sharpen the near‐convex characterization that we use and demonstrate that it is homeomorphic to the bounded distortion harmonic mapping space (instead of merely being bijective).

We present a method for locally injective seamless parametrization of triangular mesh surfaces of arbitrary genus, with or without boundaries, given desired cone points and rational holonomy angles (multiples of 2π/ q for some positive integer q ). The basis of the method is an elegant generalization of Tutte's "spring embedding theorem" to this setting. The surface is cut to a disk and a harmonic system with appropriate rotation constraints is solved, resulting in a harmonic global parametrization (HGP) method. We show a remarkable result: that if the triangles adjacent to the cones and boundary are positively oriented, and the correct cone and turning angles are induced, then the resulting map is guaranteed to be locally injective. Guided by this result, we solve the linear system by convex optimization, imposing convexification frames on only the boundary and cone triangles, and minimizing a Laplacian energy to achieve harmonicity. We compare HGP to state-of-the-art methods and see that it is the most robust, and is significantly faster than methods with comparable robustness.

Planar shape interpolation is a classic problem in computer graphics. We present a novel shape interpolation method that blends C ∞ planar harmonic mappings represented in closed-form. The intermediate mappings in the blending are guaranteed to be locally injective C ∞ harmonic mappings, with conformal and isometric distortion bounded by that of the input mappings. The key to the success of our method is the fact that the blended differentials of our interpolated mapping have a simple closed-form expression, so they can be evaluated with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. Moreover, in contrast to previous approaches, these differentials are integrable, and result in an actual mapping without further modification. Our algorithm is embarrassingly parallel and is orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods due to its simplicity, yet it still produces mappings that are superior to those of existing techniques due to its guaranteed bounds on geometric distortion.

We present a framework for global parametrization that utilizes the edge lengths (squared) of the mesh as variables. Given a mesh with arbitrary topology and prescribed cone singularities, we flatten the original metric of the surface under strict bounds on the metric distortion (various types of conformal and isometric measures are supported). Our key observation is that the space of bounded distortion metrics (given any particular bounds) is convex, and a broad range of useful and well-known distortion energies are convex as well. With the addition of nonlinear Gaussian curvature constraints, the parametrization problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, and a solution gives a locally injective map. Our method is easy to implement. Sequential convex programming (SCP) is utilized to solve this problem effectively. We demonstrate the flexibility of the method and its uncompromised robustness and compare it to state-of-the-art methods.