Using libigl's uniformly_sample_two_manifold - mesh

I'm trying to use the function of libigl uniformly_sample_two_manifold, but it does not work as described and there is no documentation whatsoever to help me understand why.
I have a 3D mesh represented as Eigen::MatrixXd V with vertices and Eigen::MatrixXi F with faces. I'm attempting to use the function as follows:
igl::uniformly_sample_two_manifold(V, F, 20, 1.0, Out);
... giving the function my vertices, faces, and asking for 20 uniform samples in the Out structure. I set the "push factor" to 1 since I don´t think I have any use for it now.
I noticed that the function specifically askes for "positions of mesh in weight space", which I presumed means the vertex positions. If I use it like this, however, the function returns the expected amount of vertices which are clustered very close to each other and are by no means uniformly distributed across the mesh.
Does anyone happen to know how to correctly use this function? Or would anyone know what does this "weight space" mean?
Thanks!

Related

In CGAL, can one convert a triangulation in more than three dimensions to a polytope?

If this question would be more appropriate on a related site, let me know, and I'd be happy to move it.
I have 165 vertices in ℤ11, all of which are at a distance of √8 from the origin and are extreme points on their corresponding convex hull. CGAL is able to calculate their d-dimensional triangulation in only 133 minutes on my laptop using just under a gigabyte of RAM.
Magma manages a similar 66 vertex case quite quickly, and, crucially for my application, it returns an actual polytope instead of a triangulation. Thus, I can view each d-dimensional face as a single object which can be bounded by an arbitrary number of vertices.
Additionally, although less essential to my application, I can also use Graph : TorPol -> GrphUnd to calculate all the topological information regarding how those faces are connected, and then AutomorphismGroup : Grph -> GrpPerm, ... to find the corresponding automorphism group of that cell structure.
Unfortunately, when applied to the original polytope, Magma's AutomorphismGroup : TorPol -> GrpMat only returns subgroups of GLd(ℤ), instead of the full automorphism group G, which is what I'm truly hoping to calculate. As a matrix group, G ∉ GL11(ℤ), but is instead ∈ GL11(𝔸), where 𝔸 represents the algebraic numbers. In general, I won't need the full algebraic closure of the rationals, ℚ̅, but just some field extension. However, I could make use of any non-trivially powerful representation of G.
With two days of calculation, Magma can manage the 165 vertex case, but is only able to provide information about the polytope's original 165 vertices, 10-facets, and volume. However, attempting to enumerate the d-faces, for any 2 ≤ d < 10, quickly consumes the 256 GB of RAM I have at my disposal.
CGAL's triangulation, on the other hand, only calculates collections of d-simplices, all of which have d + 1 vertices. It seems possible to derive the same facial information from such a triangulation, but I haven't thought of an easy way to code that up.
Am I missing something obvious in CGAL? Do you have any suggestions for alternative ways to calculate the polytope's face information, or to find the full automorphism group of my set of points?
You can use the package Combinatorial maps in CGAL, that is able to represent polytopes in nD. A combinatorial map describes all cells and all incidence and adjacency relations between the cells.
In this package, there is an undocumented method are_cc_isomorphic allowing to test if an isomorphism exist from two starting points. I think you can use this method from all possible pair of starting points to find all automorphisms.
Unfortunatly, there is no method to build a combinatorial map from a dD triangulation. Such method exists in 3D (cf. this file). It can be extended in dD.

How to map the node identities of my resulting surface mesh generated from Poisson_surface_reconstruction_3 into my starting point sets?

thanks for reading this question. My title is basically what I'm trying to achieve. I did a poisson surface mesh generation using Poisson_surface_reconstruction_3(cgal). I can't figure out how to map the node identities of my resulting surface mesh into my starting point sets?
The output of my poisson surface generation is produced by the following lines:
CGAL::facets_in_complex_2_to_triangle_mesh(c2t3, output_mesh);
out << output_mesh;
In my output file, there are some x y z coordinates, followed by a set of 3 integers each line, I think they indicates which nodes form a delaunay triangle. The problem is that the output points do not correspond to my initial point set, since not any x y z value match to any of my original points. Yet I'm trying to figure out which points are forming a delaunay triangles in my original point set.
Could someone suggest me how can I do this in cgal?
Many thanks.
The poisson recontruction algorithm consist in meshing an implicit function that somehow fits you input points. In practice, it means that you input point will no belong to the set of points of the output surface, and won't even lie exactly on triangles of the output surface. However, they should not be too far from the output surface (except if you have some really sparse sampling parts).
What you can do to locate your input points with the output surface is to use the function closest_point_and_primitive() from the AABB-tree class.
Here is an example of how to build the tree from a mesh.

VTK / ITK Dice Similarity Coefficient on Meshes

I am new to VTK and am trying to compute the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), starting from 2 meshes.
DSC can be computed as 2 Vab / (Va + Vb), where Vab is the overlapping volume among mesh A and mesh B.
To read a mesh (i.e. an organ contour exported in .vtk format using 3D Slicer, https://www.slicer.org) I use the following snippet:
string inputFilename1 = "organ1.vtk";
// Get all data from the file
vtkSmartPointer<vtkGenericDataObjectReader> reader1 = vtkSmartPointer<vtkGenericDataObjectReader>::New();
reader1->SetFileName(inputFilename1.c_str());
reader1->Update();
vtkSmartPointer<vtkPolyData> struct1 = reader1->GetPolyDataOutput();
I can compute the volume of the two meshes using vtkMassProperties (although I observed some differences between the ones computed with VTK and the ones computed with 3D Slicer).
To then intersect 2 meshses, I am trying to use vtkIntersectionPolyDataFilter. The output of this filter, however, is a set of lines that marks the intersection of the input vtkPolyData objects, and NOT a closed surface. I therefore need to somehow generate a mesh from these lines and compute its volume.
Do you know which can be a good, accurate way to generete such a mesh and how to do it?
Alternatively, I tried to use ITK as well. I found a package that is supposed to handle this problem (http://www.insight-journal.org/browse/publication/762, dated 2010) but I am not able to compile it against the latest version of ITK. It says that ITK must be compiled with the (now deprecated) ITK_USE_REVIEW flag ON. Needless to say, I compiled it with the new Module_ITKReview set to ON and also with backward compatibility but had no luck.
Finally, if you have any other alternative (scriptable) software/library to solve this problem, please let me know. I need to perform these computation automatically.
You could try vtkBooleanOperationPolyDataFilter
http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkBooleanOperationPolyDataFilter.html
filter->SetOperationToIntersection();
if your data is smooth and well-behaved, this filter works pretty good. However, sharp structures, e.g. the ones originating from binary image marching cubes algorithm can make a problem for it. That said, vtkPolyDataToImageStencil doesn't necessarily perform any better on this regard.
I had once impression that the boolean operation on polygons is not really ideal for "organs" of size 100k polygons and more. Depends.
If you want to compute a Dice Similarity Coefficient, I suggest you first generate volumes (rasterize) from the meshes by use of vtkPolyDataToImageStencil.
Then it's easy to compute the DSC.
Good luck :)

Does CGAL 2D Conforming Mesh support fix points?

In my meshing application I will have to specify fix points within a domain. The idea is that, the fix points must also be the element points after the domain is being meshed.
Furthermore, the elements around the fix points should be more dense. The general concept is that for the fix points, there should exist a radius r around those points, such that the mesh size inside r is of different sizes than outside of the r. The mesh sizes inside and outside of the r should be specifiable.
Are these two things doable in CGAL 2D Mesh algorithm?
Using your wording, all the input point of the initial constrained Delaunay triangulation will be fix points, because the 2D mesh generator only insert new points in the triangulation: it never removes any point.
As for the density, you can copy, paste, and modify a criteria class, such as CGAL::Delaunay_mesh_size_criteria_2<CDT> so that the local size upper bound is smaller around the fix points.
Now, the difficulty is how to implement that new size policy. Your criteria class could store a const reference to another Delaunay_triangulation_2, that contains only the fixed points you want. Then, for each triangle query, you can call nearest_vertex and then actually check if the distance between the query point is smaller that the radius bound of your circles. For a triangle, you can either verify that for only its barycenter, or for all three points of the triangle. Then, according to the result of that/those query(s), you can modify the size bound, in the code of your copy of CGAL::Delaunay_mesh_size_criteria_2<CDT>.
Yes, no points will be removed from the triangulation by the mesher.
Note however that if you insert points too close to a constraint this will induce a refinement of the constraint while it is not Gabriel.

Fitting curves to a set of points

Basically, I have a set of up to 100 co-ordinates, along with the desired tangents to the curve at the first and last point.
I have looked into various methods of curve-fitting, by which I mean an algorithm with takes the inputted data points and tangents, and outputs the equation of the cure, such as the gaussian method and interpolation, but I really struggled understanding them.
I am not asking for code (If you choose to give it, thats acceptable though :) ), I am simply looking for help into this algorithm. It will eventually be converted to Objective-C for an iPhone app, if that changes anything..
EDIT:
I know the order of all of the points. They are not too close together, so passing through all points is necessary - aka interpolation (unless anyone can suggest something else). And as far as I know, an algebraic curve is what I'm looking for. This is all being done on a 2D plane by the way
I'd recommend to consider cubic splines. There is some explanation and code to calculate them in plain C in Numerical Recipes book (chapter 3.3)
Most interpolation methods originally work with functions: given a set of x and y values, they compute a function which computes a y value for every x value, meeting the specified constraints. As a function can only ever compute a single y value for every x value, such an curve cannot loop back on itself.
To turn this into a real 2D setup, you want two functions which compute x resp. y values based on some parameter that is conventionally called t. So the first step is computing t values for your input data. You can usually get a good approximation by summing over euclidean distances: think about a polyline connecting all your points with straight segments. Then the parameter would be the distance along this line for every input pair.
So now you have two interpolation problem: one to compute x from t and the other y from t. You can formulate this as a spline interpolation, e.g. using cubic splines. That gives you a large system of linear equations which you can solve iteratively up to the desired precision.
The result of a spline interpolation will be a piecewise description of a suitable curve. If you wanted a single equation, then a lagrange interpolation would fit that bill, but the result might have odd twists and turns for many sets of input data.