Welcome







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 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 and the European Union.
News
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We have a paper on the interactive segmentation of textured point clouds at VMV 2022. |
Oct. 4, 2022 |
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Our paper on automatic differentiation received the best paper award (1st place) at the Symposium on Geometry Processing 2022 |
July 6, 2022 |
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We have a paper on fast and exact mesh Booleans at SIGGRAPH 2022. |
June 13, 2022 |
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In collaboration with CNIC Madrid we have a paper on the geometry of heart development in Nature Cardiovascular Research. |
May 18, 2022 |
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Prof. Kobbelt will be on sabbatical (Forschungssemester) during the winter semester 2021. Please note that the lecture Basic Techniques in Computer Graphics will only be held in Bonn. Our seminars and practical courses take place as usual. |
July 16, 2021 |
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Our papers Surface Map Homology Inference and Geodesic Distance Computation via Virtual Source Propagation received best paper awards (1st and 2nd place) at the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2021. |
July 16, 2021 |
Recent Publications
![]() EMBER: Exact Mesh Booleans via Efficient & Robust Local Arrangements SIGGRAPH 2022 Boolean operators are an essential tool in a wide range of geometry processing and CAD/CAM tasks. We present a novel method, EMBER, to compute Boolean operations on polygon meshes which is exact, reliable, and highly performant at the same time. Exactness is guaranteed by using a plane-based representation for the input meshes along with recently introduced homogeneous integer coordinates. Reliability and robustness emerge from a formulation of the algorithm via generalized winding numbers and mesh arrangements. High performance is achieved by avoiding the (pre-)construction of a global acceleration structure. Instead, our algorithm performs an adaptive recursive subdivision of the scene’s bounding box while generating and tracking all required data on the fly. By leveraging a number of early-out termination criteria, we can avoid the generation and inspection of regions that do not contribute to the output. With a careful implementation and a work-stealing multi-threading architecture, we are able to compute Boolean operations between meshes with millions of triangles at interactive rates. We run an extensive evaluation on the Thingi10K dataset to demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, even inexact ones like QuickCSG, by orders of magnitude. ![]() |
![]() Scan2FEM: From Point Clouds to Structured 3D Models Suitable for Simulation EUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage Preservation of cultural heritage is important to prevent singular objects or sites of cultural importance to decay. One aspect of preservation is the creation of a digital twin. In case of a catastrophic event, this twin can be used to support repairs or reconstruction, in order to stay faithful to the original object or site. Certain activities in prolongation of such an objects lifetime may involve adding or replacing structural support elements to prevent a collapse. We propose an automatic method that is capable of transforming a point cloud into a geometric representation that is suitable for structural analysis. We robustly find cuboids and their connections in a point cloud to approximate the wooden beam structure contained inside. We export the necessary information to perform structural analysis, on the example of the timber attic of the UNESCO World Heritage Aachen Cathedral. We provide evaluation of the resulting cuboids’ quality and show how a user can interactively refine the cuboids in order to improve the approximated model, and consequently the simulation results. ![]() |
![]() TinyAD: Automatic Differentiation in Geometry Processing Made Simple Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2022 Non-linear optimization is essential to many areas of geometry processing research. However, when experimenting with different problem formulations or when prototyping new algorithms, a major practical obstacle is the need to figure out derivatives of objective functions, especially when second-order derivatives are required. Deriving and manually implementing gradients and Hessians is both time-consuming and error-prone. Automatic differentiation techniques address this problem, but can introduce a diverse set of obstacles themselves, e.g. limiting the set of supported language features, imposing restrictions on a program's control flow, incurring a significant run time overhead, or making it hard to exploit sparsity patterns common in geometry processing. We show that for many geometric problems, in particular on meshes, the simplest form of forward-mode automatic differentiation is not only the most flexible, but also actually the most efficient choice. We introduce TinyAD: a lightweight C++ library that automatically computes gradients and Hessians, in particular of sparse problems, by differentiating small (tiny) sub-problems. Its simplicity enables easy integration; no restrictions on, e.g., looping and branching are imposed. TinyAD provides the basic ingredients to quickly implement first and second order Newton-style solvers, allowing for flexible adjustment of both problem formulations and solver details. By showcasing compact implementations of methods from parametrization, deformation, and direction field design, we demonstrate how TinyAD lowers the barrier to exploring non-linear optimization techniques. This enables not only fast prototyping of new research ideas, but also improves replicability of existing algorithms in geometry processing. TinyAD is available to the community as an open source library. ![]() |