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Welcome


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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 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

We have a paper on greedily generating artwork using Bézier segments at VMV 2023.

May 23, 2023

Our paper on surface maps received the Günter Enderle Best Paper Award at Eurographics 2023.

May 12, 2023

We have a paper on the interactive segmentation of textured point clouds at VMV 2022.

Oct. 4, 2022

Our paper on automatic differentiation received the best paper award (1st place) at the Symposium on Geometry Processing 2022

July 6, 2022

We have a paper on fast and exact mesh Booleans at SIGGRAPH 2022.

June 13, 2022

In collaboration with CNIC Madrid we have a paper on the geometry of heart development in Nature Cardiovascular Research.

May 18, 2022

Recent Publications

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Neural Implicit Shape Editing Using Boundary Sensitivity

International Conference on Learning Representations 2023

Neural fields are receiving increased attention as a geometric representation due to their ability to compactly store detailed and smooth shapes and easily undergo topological changes. Compared to classic geometry representations, however, neural representations do not allow the user to exert intuitive control over the shape. Motivated by this, we leverage boundary sensitivity to express how perturbations in parameters move the shape boundary. This allows to interpret the effect of each learnable parameter and study achievable deformations. With this, we perform geometric editing: finding a parameter update that best approximates a globally prescribed deformation. Prescribing the deformation only locally allows the rest of the shape to change according to some prior, such as semantics or deformation rigidity. Our method is agnostic to the model its training and updates the NN in-place. Furthermore, we show how boundary sensitivity helps to optimize and constrain objectives (such as surface area and volume), which are difficult to compute without first converting to another representation, such as a mesh.

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Surface Maps via Adaptive Triangulations

Eurographics 2023

We present a new method to compute continuous and bijective maps (surface homeomorphisms) between two or more genus-0 triangle meshes. In contrast to previous approaches, we decouple the resolution at which a map is represented from the resolution of the input meshes. We discretize maps via common triangulations that approximate the input meshes while remaining in bijective correspondence to them. Both the geometry and the connectivity of these triangulations are optimized with respect to a single objective function that simultaneously controls mapping distortion, triangulation quality, and approximation error. A discrete-continuous optimization algorithm performs both energy-based remeshing as well as global second-order optimization of vertex positions, parametrized via the sphere. With this, we combine the disciplines of compatible remeshing and surface map optimization in a unified formulation and make a contribution in both fields. While existing compatible remeshing algorithms often operate on a fixed pre-computed surface map, we can now globally update this correspondence during remeshing. On the other hand, bijective surface-to-surface map optimization previously required computing costly overlay meshes that are inherently tied to the input mesh resolution. We achieve significant complexity reduction by instead assessing distortion between the approximating triangulations. This new map representation is inherently more robust than previous overlay-based approaches, is less intricate to implement, and naturally supports mapping between more than two surfaces. Moreover, it enables adaptive multi-resolution schemes that, e.g., first align corresponding surface regions at coarse resolutions before refining the map where needed. We demonstrate significant speedups and increased flexibility over state-of-the art mapping algorithms at similar map quality, and also provide a reference implementation of the method.

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Towards Discovering Meaningful Historical Relationships in Virtual Reality

2023 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW)

Traditional digital tools for exploring historical data mostly rely on conventional 2D visualizations, which often cannot reveal all relevant interrelationships between historical fragments. We are working on a novel interactive exploration tool for historical data in virtual reality, which arranges fragments in a 3D environment based on their temporal, spatial and categorical proximity to a reference fragment. In this poster, we report on an initial expert review of our approach, giving us valuable insights into the use cases and requirements that inform our further developments.

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