Assumptions on the reach are crucial for ensuring the correctness of many geometric and topological algorithms, including triangulation, manifold reconstruction and learning, homotopy reconstruction, and methods for estimating curvature or reach. However, these assumptions are often coupled with the requirement that the manifold be smooth, typically at least C². In this paper, we prove that any manifold with positive reach can be approximated arbitrarily well by a C^∞ manifold without significantly reducing the reach. More precisely, given a manifold with reach R, we construct a manifold that is ε-close to it in the C¹ sense (both the manifold and its tangent spaces are close), and has reach at least R-ε. The proof employs techniques from differential topology - partitions of unity and smoothing using convolution kernels. This result implies that nearly all theorems established for C² or manifolds with a certain reach naturally extend to manifolds with the same reach, even if they are not C², for free!

Conference version, full version is given in hal-03721463

In our companion paper "Tight bounds for the learning of homotopy à la Niyogi, Smale, and Weinberger for subsets of Euclidean spaces and of Riemannian manifolds" we gave optimal bounds (in terms of the two one-sided Hausdorff distances) on a sample P of an input shape 𝒮 (either manifold or general set with positive reach) such that one can infer the homotopy of 𝒮 from the union of balls with some radius centred at P, both in Euclidean space and in a Riemannian manifold of bounded curvature. The construction showing the optimality of the bounds is not straightforward. The purpose of this video is to visualize and thus elucidate said construction in the Euclidean setting.

We prove that the medial axis of closed sets is Hausdorff stable in the following sense: Let 𝒮 ⊆ ℝ^d be a fixed closed set that contains a bounding sphere. That is, the bounding sphere is part of the set 𝒮. Consider the space of C^{1,1} diffeomorphisms of ℝ^d to itself, which keep the bounding sphere invariant. The map from this space of diffeomorphisms (endowed with a Banach norm) to the space of closed subsets of ℝ^d (endowed with the Hausdorff distance), mapping a diffeomorphism F to the closure of the medial axis of F(𝒮), is Lipschitz. This extends a previous stability result of Chazal and Soufflet on the stability of the medial axis of C² manifolds under C² ambient diffeomorphisms.

We study a new discretization of the Gaussian curvature for polyhedral surfaces. This discrete Gaussian curvature is defined on each conical singularity of a polyhedral surface as the quotient of the angle defect and the area of the Voronoi cell corresponding to the singularity. We divide polyhedral surfaces into discrete conformal classes using a generalization of discrete conformal equivalence pioneered by Feng Luo. We subsequently show that, in every discrete conformal class, there exists a polyhedral surface with constant discrete Gaussian curvature. We also provide explicit examples to demonstrate that this surface is in general not unique.