Variational Surface Cutting
Date
Monday, June 25, 2018 13:00 - 14:30
Speaker
Nick Sharp (Carnegie Mellon University)
Location
Big Seminar room Ground floor / Office Bldg West (I21.EG.101)
Series
Seminar/Talk
Tags
Mathematics and CS Seminar
Host
Chris Wojtan
Contact
In this talk, I will present a global variational approach to cutting curved surfaces so that they can be flattened into the plane with low metric distortion. Such cuts are a critical component in a variety of algorithms that seek to parameterize surfaces over flat domains, or fabricate structures from flat materials. Rather than evaluate the quality of a cut solely based on properties of the curve itself (e.g., its length or curvature), we formulate a flow that directly optimizes the distortion induced by cutting and flattening. Notably, we do not have to explicitly parameterize the surface in order to evaluate the cost of a cut, but can instead integrate a simple evolution equation defined on the cut curve itself. We arrive at this flow via a novel application of shape derivatives to the Yamabe equation from conformal geometry, and develop an Eulerian numerical integrator on triangulated surfaces. We also explore potential applications to computational design.