Welcome



Welcome to the Computer Graphics Group at RWTH Aachen University!

The research and teaching activities at our institute focus on geometry acquisition and processing, on interactive visualization, and on related areas such as computer vision, photo-realistic image synthesis, and ultra high speed multimedia data transmission.

In our projects we are cooperating with various industry companies (e.g. BMW, Siemens, Philips, EADS, ...) as well as with academic research groups around the world. Results are published and presented at high-profile conferences and symposia. Additional funding sources, among others, are the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, the European Union, and the German Israelian Foundation.

News

We have a paper at SIGGRAPH 2013.

April 19, 2013

Source Code for our ECCV 2012 paper on Image-Based Localization

We uploaded a new version of our localization framework that fixes a small bug. Please see the image-based localization project page for details.

March 15, 2013

We have a paper at CVPR 2013.

March 5, 2013

We have a paper at Eurographics 2013.

March 1, 2013

Our extensive Polygon Mesh Repairing survey has been published in ACM Computing Surveys

Feb. 7, 2013

Next Generation Constrained Mixed-Integer Solver (CoMISo) Released!

Now with efficient re-solves of constrained systems with updated right hand sides, several non-linear solver interfaces and less dependencies!

Nov. 16, 2012

Recent Publications

Integer-Grid Maps for Reliable Quad Meshing

SIGGRAPH 2013

Quadrilateral remeshing approaches based on global parametrization enable many desirable mesh properties. Two of the most important ones are (1) high regularity due to explicit control over irregular vertices and (2) smooth distribution of distortion achieved by convex variational formulations. Apart from these strengths, state-of-the-art techniques suffer from limited reliability on real-world input data, i.e. the determined map might have degeneracies like (local) non-injectivities and consequently often cannot be used directly to generate a quadrilateral mesh. In this paper we propose a novel convex Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) formulation which ensures by construction that the resulting map is within the class of so called Integer-Grid Maps that are guaranteed to imply a quad mesh. In order to overcome the NP-hardness of MIQP and to be able to remesh typical input geometries in acceptable time we propose two additional problem specific optimizations: a complexity reduction algorithm and singularity separating conditions. While the former decouples the dimension of the MIQP search space from the input complexity of the triangle mesh and thus is able to dramatically speed up the computation without inducing inaccuracies, the latter improves the continuous relaxation, which is crucial for the success of modern MIQP optimizers. Our experiments show ...

 

Dual Loops Meshing: Quality Quad Layouts on Manifolds

SIGGRAPH 2012

We present a theoretical framework and practical method for the automatic construction of simple, all-quadrilateral patch layouts on manifold surfaces. The resulting layouts are coarse, surface-embedded cell complexes well adapted to the geometric structure, hence they are ideally suited as domains and base complexes for surface parameterization, spline fitting, or subdivision surfaces and can be used to generate quad meshes with a high-level patch structure that are advantageous in many application scenarios. Our approach is based on the careful construction of the layout graph's combinatorial dual. In contrast to the primal this dual perspective provides direct control over the globally interdependent structural constraints inherent to quad layouts. The dual layout is built from curvature-guided, crossing loops on the surface. A novel method to construct these efficiently in a geometry- and structure-aware manner constitutes the core of our approach.

 

Efficient Computation of Shortest Path-Concavity for 3D Meshes

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2013

In the context of shape segmentation and retrieval object-wide distributions of measures are needed to accurately evaluate and compare local regions of shapes. Lien et al. proposed two point-wise concavity measures in the context of Approximate Convex Decompositions of polygons measuring the distance from a point to the polygon’s convex hull: an accurate Shortest Path-Concavity (SPC) measure and a Straight Line-Concavity (SLC) approximation of the same. While both are practicable on 2D shapes, the exponential costs of SPC in 3D makes it inhibitively expensive for a generalization to meshes. In this paper we propose an efficient and straight forward approximation of the Shortest Path-Concavity measure to 3D meshes. Our approximation is based on discretizing the space between mesh and convex hull, thereby reducing the continuous Shortest Path search to an efficiently solvable graph problem. Our approach works out-of-the-box on complex mesh topologies and requires no complicated handling of genus. Besides presenting a rigorous evaluation of our method on a variety of input meshes, we also define an SPC-based Shape Descriptor and show its superior retrieval and runtime performance compared with the recently presented results on the Convexity Distribution by Lian et al.

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