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Medial Spheres for Shape Representation - CIM - McGill University

Medial Spheres for Shape Representation - CIM - McGill University

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epresent a shape. Octrees use axis-aligned cells of mixed size: coarse cells containing<br />

geometry are subdivided until a desired resolution is reached. Because each voxel has<br />

at most 26 voxel neighbours, voxel data sets can be analyzed by exploring these digital<br />

neighbourhoods. Storage requirements of high resolution voxel data sets are large. Octrees<br />

have smaller storage requirements than voxel representations when a small number of cells<br />

in a volume is ‘on’.<br />

Union of Balls <strong>Representation</strong>s<br />

Given a set of balls B = {(ci, ri)|ci ∈ R 3 , ri ∈ R} with centres ci and radii ri, the<br />

surface of the union of balls is the zero level set of the function<br />

F : R 3 → R,<br />

x ↦→ min<br />

i {d(x, ci) − ri}.<br />

This shape representation is advocated in the work of Alain Fournier [97] as a supe-<br />

rior shape representation to triangle meshes because of its stability, as shapes represented<br />

using the same or similar sets of spheres can be described by completely different triangle<br />

meshes in terms of the location of the triangle vertices and their adjacency, and because of<br />

the relative invariance of union of spheres representations to noise in the input.<br />

The generation of union of balls representations that offer advantages over alterna-<br />

tive representations is not trivial. Chapter 7, Section 7.1, surveys existing approaches <strong>for</strong><br />

approximating a shape with balls.<br />

Union of balls shape representations can provide advantages against triangle mesh<br />

representations in those applications that do not need to represent small-scale, sharp, and<br />

6

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