Speaker: Prof. Wenping Wang, University of Hong Kong

Time：16：00-17：00 pm, May 12

Venue: Lecture Hall, Second Floor, Office Building, Software Campus

Title: Fast and Stable Computation of Medial Axis Transform of 3D models

Abstract: As a complete shape description, the medial axis of a geometric shape possesses a number of favorable properties--it encodes symmetry, local thickness and structural components of the shape it represents. Consequently, the medial axis has been studied extensively in shape modeling and analysis since its introduction by Blum in 1960s. However, the practical application of the medial axis is hindered by its notorious instability and lack of compact representation; that is, a primitive medial axis without proper processing is often represented as a dense discrete mesh with many spurious branches and a large number of vertices. In this talk I shall represent some recent studies on computing stable and compact representations of the medial axes of 2D and 3D shapes.  More specifically, techniques from mesh simplification will be employed to compute a medial axis without spurious branches and represented by a small number of mesh vertices, while meeting specified approximation accuracy.

Bio: Wenping Wang is Professor and Head of Computer Science Department at The University of Hong Kong.  He graduated with B.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Science at Shandong University in 1983 and got his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Alberta in 1992. His research covers computer graphics, visualization, and geometric computing. He is journal associate editor of Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD), Computers & Graphics (CAG), Computer Graphics Forum (CGF), and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) (2008-2012), and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. He is program chair of Pacific Graphics 2003, ACM Symposium on Physical and Solid Modeling (SPM) 2006, and International Conference on Shape Modeling (SMI) 2009, and conference chair of Pacific Graphics 2012, ACM Symposium on Physical and Solid Modeling (SPM) 2013, and SIGGRAPH Asia 2013.