Stripe Embedding: Efficient Maps with Exact Numeric Computation

• Published in: ACM transactions on graphics Vol. 43; no. 6; pp. 1 - 14
• Main Author: Livesu, Marco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 19.12.2024
• Subjects: Computer graphics; Computing methodologies; Mesh models; Shape modeling; surface mapping; tutte embedding
• ISSN: 0730-0301; 1557-7368
• DOI: 10.1145/3687915

We consider the fundamental problem of injectively mapping a surface mesh with disk topology onto a boundary constrained convex domain. We start from the basic observation that mapping a strip of triangles onto a rectangular shape always yields a valid embedding, if the vertices that bound the strip are sorted coherently along the sides of the rectangle. Based on this intuition, we propose a straightforward algorithm, called Stripe Embedding, that operates by decomposing the input mesh into a set of triangle strips and then embeds each strip into the target domain by means of linear interpolation between two previously embedded vertices. Thanks to its simplicity, Stripe Embedding is extremely efficient and permits to switch to an exact implementation without almost increasing its running times. Stripe Embedding is up to three orders of magnitude faster than the Tutte embedding for same numerical model and, even when implemented with costly rational numbers, it is faster than any floating point implementation of prior methods at any scale.