[comp.graphics] 3D shape fitting

gtravan@adam.ua.oz (george travan dentistry) (10/20/89)

 could someone give me a pointer to an algorithm that may be able to 'fit'
two meshes together. more specifically i have two regular meshes which 
represent iso-surfaces. i want to see how close 'in a lock and key' sense
they fit together. i cant use least squares because there are no identifiable
or corresponding landmarks on the two meshes, which are meshes generated
through arbitrary data.

you can imagine a mesh with a hill and another mesh with a trough, how can
you determine how close they can be made to correspond?

i hope this makes sense...

--GeO                     George Travan
			  University of Adelaide
			  AUSTRALIA.

			  e-mail:  gtravan@adam.ua.oz
				   george@frodo.ua.oz

finn@sunshine.cad.mcc.com (Chris Finn) (10/20/89)

In article <134@adam.ua.oz> gtravan@adam.ua.oz (george travan dentistry) writes:
>
>you can imagine a mesh with a hill and another mesh with a trough, how can
>you determine how close they can be made to correspond?
>
>i hope this makes sense...
>
I tried to email a response but it bounced so I'll post this and
maybe someone can add more concrete info.

	From what I understand you are trying to devise a 
measure of the similarity or dissimilarity of two shapes.
For instance if you have two functions (or discrete samples
of two functions) of one independent variable (y=f1(x) & y=f2(x) )
you don't want to just measure the vertical distance between
them f1(x)-f2(x), and you don't want to measure the perpendicular
distance between them. You want to first correlate the features
you see in one function with the corresponding features in the other 
function and then measure the difference between them in the direction 
in which the correlation is a maximum. In a sense one function is a 
stretched or contracted, and possibly amplified version of the other. 
	These kinds of similarity measures are used on one 
dimensional functions in speech recognition. The computer receives
a digitized version of the spoken word and tries to match it against
words in its vocabulary library. 
	I think similar techiques are used for two dimensional 
signals when interpolating between two images. For instance, an
artist draws a cartoon but doesn't want to draw all 24 frames
per second (or whatever it is). He draws the picture at two instances
which are seperated by a larger gap in time and the computer fills
in the missing images. I think this would be more like your case,
where, from what I understand, you want to measure the distance 
between z=f1(x,y) and z=f2(x,y).
	I don't have any references handy but if you have an 
engineering library at your disposal look up "speech recognition" and in
particular "time warping" or "dynamic time warping" you can 
quickly hunt down these algorithms for the one-dimensional case.

Hope this helps,


Chris Finn
MCC CAD Program, P.O. Box 200195, Austin, TX 78720 [512] 343-0978
ARPA: finn@mcc.com
UUCP: {uunet,harvard,gatech,pyramid}!cs.utexas.edu!milano!cadillac!finn

keller@ethz.UUCP (Christoph Keller) (10/23/89)

George writes:

> could someone give me a pointer to an algorithm that may be able to 'fit'
> two meshes together. more specifically i have two regular meshes which 
> represent iso-surfaces. i want to see how close 'in a lock and key' sense
> they fit together. i cant use least squares because there are no identifiable
> or corresponding landmarks on the two meshes, which are meshes generated
> through arbitrary data.
> you can imagine a mesh with a hill and another mesh with a trough, how can
> you determine how close they can be made to correspond?
> --GeO                     George Travan
> 			  e-mail:  gtravan@adam.ua.oz
> 				   george@frodo.ua.oz

This is a common problem in solar physics. The Earth's atmosphere is
distorting sequentially observed images through the randomly changing
refractive index of the atmosphere. This distortion needs to be removed
when comparing images of the same region on the sun obtained at
different times. Here are some references:

von der Luehe, O.: A study of a correlation tracking method to improve 
  imaging quality of ground based solar telescopes, Astron.Astrophys.
  119, p.85

November, L.J.: Measurement of geometric distortion in a turbulent
  atmosphere, Applied Optics, Vol.25,No.3, p.392

Keller, C.U.: Restoration of distorted images as a variational problem:
  A dynamic programming approach, NOAO Preprint No. 229
  (I can mail this article by e-mail, but without figures)

Hope this helps,

Christoph

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Christoph Keller                        keller@czheth5a.bitnet
Institute of Astronomy                  ckeller@solar.stanford.edu
ETH-Zentrum                             keller@ifa.ethz.ch
CH-8092 Zuerich                         keller@bernina.ethz.ch.uucp
Switzerland
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