Efficient collision detection within deforming spherical sliding contact

Handling the evolving permanent contact of deformable objects leads to a collision detection problem of high computing cost. Situations in which this type of contact happens are becoming more and more present with the increasing complexity of virtual human models, especially for the emerging medical applications. In this context, we propose a novel collision detection approach to deal with situations in which soft structures are in constant but dynamic contact, which is typical of 3D biological elements. Our method proceeds in two stages: First, in a preprocessing stage, a mesh is chosen under certain conditions as a reference mesh and is spherically sampled. In the collision detection stage, the resulting table is exploited for each vertex of the other mesh to obtain, in constant time, its signed distance to the fixed mesh. The two working hypotheses for this approach to succeed are typical of the deforming anatomical systems we target: First, the two meshes retain a layered configuration with respect to a central point and, second, the fixed mesh tangential deformation is bounded by the spherical sampling resolution. Within this context, the proposed approach can handle large relative displacements, reorientations, and deformations of the mobile mesh. We illustrate our method in comparison with other techniques on a biomechanical model of the human hip joint.