Diffusion Equations over Arbitrary Triangulated Surfaces for Filtering and Texture Applications

In computer graphics, triangular mesh representations of surfaces have become very popular. Compared with parametric and implicit forms of surfaces, triangular mesh surfaces have many advantages such as being easy to render, being convenient to store, and having the ability to model geometric objects with arbitrary topology. In this paper, we are interested in data processing over triangular mesh surfaces through partial differential equations (PDEs). We study several diffusion equations over triangular mesh surfaces and present corresponding numerical schemes to solve them. Our methods work for triangular mesh surfaces with arbitrary geometry (the angles of each triangle are arbitrary) and topology (open meshes or closed meshes of arbitrary genus). Besides the flexibility, our methods are efficient due to the implicit/semi-implicit time discretization. We finally apply our methods to several filtering and texture applications such as image processing, texture generation, and regularization of harmonic maps over triangular mesh surfaces. The results demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our methods.