Tangent vector fields

While scalar fields on surfaces have been staples of geometry processing, the use of tangent vector fields has steadily grown over the last two decades. Tangent vector fields are now a key ingredient in geometry processing, crucial to encode directions and sizing on surfaces as commonly required in tasks such as texture synthesis, non-photorealistic rendering, digital grooming, and meshing. There are, however, a variety of discrete representations of tangent vector fields on triangle meshes, and each approach offers a different trade-off among simplicity, efficiency, and accuracy depending on the targeted application. This course reviews the three main families of discretizations used to design computational tools for vector field processing on triangle meshes: face-based, edge-based, and vertex-based representations. In the process of reviewing the computational tools offered by these representations, we go over a large body of recent developments in vector field processing in the area of discrete differential geometry. We also discuss the theoretical and practical limitations of each type of discretization, and cover increasingly-common extensions such as n-direction and n-vector fields. While the course will focus on explaining the key approaches to practical encoding (including data structures) and manipulation (including discrete operators) of finite-dimensional vector fields, important differential geometric notions will also be covered: as often in Discrete Differential Geometry, the discrete picture will be used to illustrate deep continuous concepts such as covariant derivatives, metric connections, or Bochner Laplacians.

Link to course notes prepared for the ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 conference.

Link to slides will come later.

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