User-controlled simplification of polygonal models

Polygonal finite element provides a great flexibility in mesh generation of crack propagation problems where the topology of the domain changes significantly. However, the control of the discretization error in such problems is a main concern. In this paper, a polygonal-FEM is presented in modeling of crack propagation problems via an automatic adaptive mesh refinement procedure. The adaptive mesh refinement is accomplished based on the Zienkiewicz–Zhu error estimator in conjunction with a weighted SPR technique. Adaptive mesh refinement is employed in some steps for reduction of the discretization error and not for tracking the crack. In the steps that no adaptive mesh refinement is required, local modifications are applied on the mesh to prevent poor polygonal element shapes. Finally, several numerical examples are analyzed to demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy and robustness of the proposed computational algorithm in crack propagation problems.

We present a hybrid approach to generate plausible motions for high-DOF human-like articulated figures in constrained environment with multiple obstacles. The method combines motion planning and motion blending techniques to efficiently produce natural and collision-free human motion for different tasks.

Anisotropic mesh adaptation is a powerful way to directly minimise the computational cost of mesh based simulation. It is particularly important for multi-scale problems where the required number of floating-point operations can be reduced by orders of magnitude relative to more traditional static mesh approaches. Increasingly, finite element/volume codes are being optimised for modern multicore architectures. Inter-node parallelism for mesh adaptivity has been successfully implemented by a number of groups using domain decomposition methods. However, thread-level parallelism using programming models such as OpenMP is significantly more challenging because the underlying data structures are extensively modified during mesh adaptation and a greater degree of parallelism must be realised while keeping the code race-free. In this thesis we describe a new thread-parallel implementation of four anisotropic mesh adaptation algorithms, namely edge coarsening, element refinement, edge swapping and vertex smoothing. For each of the mesh optimisation phases we describe how safe parallel execution is guaranteed by processing workitems in batches of independent sets and using a deferredoperations strategy to update the mesh data structures in parallel without data contention. Scalable execution is further assisted by creating worklists using atomic operations, which provides a synchronisation-free alternative to reduction-based worklist algorithms. Additionally, we compare graph colouring methods for the creation of independent sets and present an improved version which can run up to 50% faster than existing techniques. Finally, we describe some early work on an interrupt-driven work-sharing for-loop scheduler which is shown to perform better than existing workstealing schedulers. Combining all aforementioned novel techniques, which are generally applicable to other unordered irregular problems, we show that despite the complex nature of mesh adaptation and inherent load imbalances, we achieve

Parallel rendering of large polygonal models with transparency is challenging due to the need for alpha-correct blending and compositing, which is costly for very large models with high depth complexity and spatial overlap. In this paper we compare the performance of raster-based rendering methods on mesh models of neurons using two applications, one of which is specifically tailored to the neuroscience application domain, the other a general purpose visualization tool with domain specific additions. The first implements both sort-first and sort-last and uses a scene graph style traversal to cull objects, and dual depth peeling for order independent transparency, whilst the other uses a simpler brute force data-parallel approach with sort last composition. The advantages and trade offs of these approaches are discussed.We present the optimized algorithms needed to achieve interactive frame rates for a non-trivial, real-world parallel rendering scenario. We show that a generic data visualization application can provide competitive performance when optimizing its rendering pipeline, with some loss of capability over an optimized domain-specific application.

The modern world of computer graphics is mostly dominated by polygonal models. Due to their scalability and ease of rendering such models have various applications in a wide range of fields. Unfortunately some shape modelling and animation problems can hardly be overcome using polygonal models only. For example, dramatic changes of the shape (involving change of topology) or metamorphosis between different shapes can not be performed easily. The Function Representation (FRep) [Pasko et al. 1995] allows us to overcome some of the problems and simplify the process of the major model modification. Our system is based on a hybrid modelling concept, where polygonal and FRep models are combined together and can be evaluated in near-real or real time. It allows us to:• produce animations involving dramatic changes of the shape (e.g. metamorphosis, viscoelastic behaviour, character modifications etc) in short times (Fig. 1)• interactively create complex shapes with changing topology (Fig. 2) and specified level of detail (LOD)• integrate existing animated polygonal models and FRep models within a single model

Proteins are cellular macromolecules made up of linear chains of amino acids that adopt a unique three-dimensional structure to carry out specific biological functions. Amongst various computational approaches developed for Protein Structure Prediction (PSP), ab initio methods perform the prediction without prior knowledge of known structures. However, due to huge computational complexity incurred by these methods, simplified hydrophobic-polar (HP) models are often used for the investigations. Despite this simplicity, PSP continues to be a hard combinatorial optimization problem requiring development of efficient heuristic search techniques. Memetic algorithm (MA), with its flexible architecture, encompasses the strength of both local and global search and has shown promise in solving problems with complex search landscape, including PSP. This thesis is focused on developing an effective ab initio technique under a suitable MA framework for solving the PSP problem using low resolution HP models. To enhance the effectiveness of the MA, a mechanism is devised to include knowledge from the problem domain by exploiting the concept of hydrophobic-core (H-core) formation. The size of the maximal possible H-core is estimated and the approximation is validated by our proposed deterministic search technique. Further, a new knowledge-based initial population generation technique ensures generating conformations which are not only valid, but also maintain diversity in the population. This helps to commence the search with good seeds leading towards faster convergence. While solving the PSP problem using MA, the greatest intricacy arises from the complex nature of its multi-modal landscape. Like all the evolutionary algorithms (EAs), MAs have the tendency to get trapped into local minima due to selection pressure and genetic drift induced by the genetic operators, and techniques are necessary to surmount this difficulty. A novel parental selection technique called “Adaptive Strategy for Assortative Mating” is developed that dynamically distributes the re production opportunity among the individuals of the population to boost the effectiveness of cross-over. Further, a new survival selection strategy, namely “Sib-based Survival Selection”, prevents the rapid spread of genetic material from a particular individual to other members in the population, ensuring the concurrent preservation of several potential solutions, and restricting premature convergence. A new diversification mechanism, namely “Memory-based Diversification”, systematically diversifies the population by introducing new genetic material whenever it gets stuck at local peaks and allows it to proceed for further progress. An extensive experimental analysis is also reported on the influence of all three techniques proposed to maintain the diversity of population. Furthermore, in order to carry out the conformational search efficiently, especially with the increase in sequence length, the optimization technique is designed such that it provides an effective balance between exploration and exploitation. A robust Multimodal Memetic Framework has been developed where optimization is accomplished in hierarchical stages. The population of each stage is partitioned into three different states: an Exploratory state to locate promising peaks, an Exploitative state to fine-tune the solutions found in the Exploratory state of the previous stage, and finally, a Central state to carry out the formation of potential solutions to explore the undiscovered regions. Non-identical genetic operators have been implemented in each state to balance the exploration and exploitation by employing necessary selection pressure and diversity. A non-isomorphic encoding based technique has been developed to capture the sub-structures that are representing a particular region. Furthermore, a novel local search technique exploits already explored fit individuals by employing the knowledge of sub-structures. The efficacy of the proposed framework is demonstrated with an adequate number of distinctive data sets and comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

Parallel algorithms are given for the exact solution of the hidden-line problem. Most of the parallel algorithms proposed for visibility problems in the literature give approximate solutions. and thus cannot yield an upper bound on the complexity of the particular problem. The first algorithm proposed here is worth mentioning not only for its simplicity. but also from a practical point of view: a speed up of a factor P is achieved by using P processors. 1≤P≤N, where N is the number of edges used to describe a polygonal scene. Additionally. the problem of aliasing inherent with approximation methods is avoided. The significance of the second algorithm, which is based on the first one, is mainly on the theoretical level: it is used to establish the parallel complexity of the hidden-line problem. The sequential complexity of this problem has recently been proved to be Θ(N2), and now we can prove that in the parallel case the problem is in the complexity class NC, i.e., it can be solved in time polynomial in log N by using a number of processors polynomial in N, assuming any reasonable model of parallel computation. More particularly, an O (log N) parallel time solution is given which cannot be further improved even if arbitrarily many processors of a concurrent read, exclusive write parallel RAM model are available.

An explicit spline representation of smooth free-form surfaces is combined with a hierarchy of meshes to form the basis of an interactive sculpting environment. The environment offers localized hierarchical modeling at different levels of detail, direct surface manipulation, change of connectivity for extrusion and to form holes and bridges, and built-in tangent continuity across the surface where wanted. The free-form surface is represented and can be exported either in NURBS form or as cubic triangular Bezier patches. Key characteristics of the approach are: (1) mesh pieces and surface pieces are related by strictly local averaging rules; (2) refinement rules depend only on direct, coarser-level ancestors and not on adjacent submeshes or patches; (3) submeshes at different levels look alike. The underlying data structure is a single winged-edge structure with additional pointers to support the hierarchy. Multiply refined regions may be directly adjacent to unrefined regions, and mesh fragments at different levels of refinement can be connected. CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—Curve, surface, solid, and object representations,Splines; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Graphics data structures and data types 1 Motivation, results and prior work Conventional modeling systems require precise specification of final features, e.g., distance in datum planes, positioning of control vertices with respect to one another, etc. Besides requiring a certain mindset not always compatible with creative, exploratory design, this is modeling at the highest level of refinement: a change in the overall shape of the model entails modifying all detail, however small, associated with the area of change. Not only is this time-consuming, but repeated detail work puts an undue strain on creative, exploratory design. Parameterized modeling, which allows initially precisely instantiated specifications to be varied, has been used in commercial solid modeling systems. A complementary paradigm that supports changes at different levels in the design gonzalez@acm.org yjorg@cise.ufl.edu zSupported by NSF National Young Investigator award 9457806-CCR history is hierarchical refinement. Levels express the designer’s intent by encoding the structure and dependence of geometric features. Several recent modeling environments are based on hierarchical modeling [10, 7, 21, 13]. Localized-hierarchy Surface Splines (LeSS) extend this modeling paradigm by combining localized mesh hierarchies with the ability to change topology by adding a handle or punching a hole. LeSS automatically maintains tangent continuity across the surface where wanted and defines the surface in standard form either as bicubic NURBS or cubic triangular Bezier patches. Non-standard properties of LeSS are: 1. The surface is represented explicitly in piecewise polynomial or spline form, and not as surface patches offset from ancestor surfaces. Finer-level patches replace coarse-level patches. Changes are propagated from coarse to fine inside an underlying mesh hierarchy: fragments (pieces with boundary) of finer meshes are represented as offsets in local coordinate frames of coarser meshes. This has several implications: The evaluation of the spline patches does not require traversal of the hierarchy and is numerically stable. Explicit bounding boxes and convex hulls for the surface are directly available and the moments of the enclosed object can be efficiently computed. The influence of changing coarser levels is transmitted by local reevaluation of the mesh hierarchy. Local topology changes are possible because there is no direct 1-1 correspondence of the coarse to the finer-level surface. 2. LeSS is based on a strictly localized hierarchy: the default position of a finer level mesh fragment before local editing is determined by local averaging rules that depend only on those coarser-level nodes from which the mesh nodes of the fragment are offset and not on adjacent mesh or patch information. This simplifies the data structures since no searches for neighbors at different levels of refinement are necessary. Repeatedly-refined patches can be placed directly next to unrefined patches. (Since the surface representation is explicit, the resolution of ‘crack problems’ where refined and unrefined patches meet can be delegated to the spline display routine.) 3. The representation is homogeneous: control structures everywhere, even across levels, look the same. Together with locality this homogeneity allows connecting arbitrary submeshes. This is useful since not all parts of a complex object must enter a strict dependence relation with all other parts – the designer’s choice of dependence can be only local and later decisions, say to join parts or create a hole (Figure 9), are not prevented by a rigid, global hierarchy.

Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) lithography is a new technology for production of integrated circuits. In EUV lithographic machines, optical elements are heated by absorption of exposure energy. Heating induces thermoelastic deformations of optical elements and consequently, it creates wavefront aberrations. These Thermally Induced Wavefront Aberrations (TIWA) can significantly degrade the resolution of EUV lithographic machines. One of the ways to correct TIWA and consequently, to improve the resolution of EUV lithographic machines, is to use the Adaptive Optics (AO) technique and predictive control algorithms. However, the predictive control of TIWA is a challenging problem, mainly because the dynamical behavior of TIWA is described by thermoelastic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). By discretizing the thermoelastic equations using the finite difference or finite element methods, large-scale state-space models can be obtained. A striking feature of these state-space models is that they have sparse (multi) banded matrices. Consequently, these state-space models can be interpreted as large-scale networks of local subsystems. All this implies that the problem of correcting TIWA can be placed in a much more general context of identifying, estimating and controlling large-scale interconnected (distributed) systems. However, currently used estimation and control algorithms are not computationally feasible for large-scale systems. For this reason, this thesis focuses on the development of computationally efficient identification, estimation and control algorithms for large-scale interconnected systems. In this thesis, we prove that the inverses of (finite-time) Gramians of large-scale interconnected systems, obtained by discretizing PDEs, belong to a class of off-diagonally decaying matrices. Consequently, these inverses can be approximated by sparse (multi) banded matrices with O(N) complexity, where N is the number of local subsystems. To compute the approximate inverses, the Chebyshev approximation method and the Newton iteration are used. On the basis of these theoretical results, we develop novel estimation and identification algorithms for large-scale interconnected systems. The computational and memory complexity of these methods scale with O(N). This is the main advantage over the traditional estimation and identification methods, which complexity is O(N^3). Furthermore, in this thesis we develop and experimentally verify AO control algorithms for predictive correction of TIWA. The experimental results give a good first indication for a possible implementation of the developed predictive control algorithms in EUV lithographic machines. Finally, we develop and experimentally test an iterative learning control algorithm for high performance correction of wavefront aberrations.

Meshless methods are numerical methods that have the advantage of high accuracy without the need of an explicitly described mesh topology. In this class of methods, the Radial Point Interpolation Method (RPIM) is a promising collocation method where the application of radial basis functions yields high interpolation accuracy for even strongly unstructured node distributions. For electromagnetic simulations in particular, this distinguishing characteristic translates into an enhanced capability for conformal and multi-scale modeling. The method also facilitates adaptive discretization refinements, which provides an important tool to decrease memory consumption and computation time. In this paper, a refinement strategy is introduced for RPIM. In the proposed node adaptation algorithm, the accuracy of a solution is increased iteratively based on an initial solution with a coarse discretization. In contrast to the commonly used residual-based adaptivity algorithms, this definition is extended by an error estimator based on the solution gradient. In the studied cases this strategy leads to increased convergence rates compared with the standard algorithm. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

H.264/AVC, the latest video coding standard, adopts rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to obtain the best intra- and inter-prediction, while maximizing visual quality and minimizing the required bitrate. However, the full RD cost calculation for all intra-prediction modes, the exhaustive searches for finding optimal motion vectors for all block sizes, and the multiple references frame procedure considerably increase its computational complexity with the allowed number of prediction modes. The authors have previously proposed an approach for both inter- and intra-mode decisions that takes into account the several effective parameters, image content type, quantization parameter, correlation of motion vectors and motion details of video objects. In order to reduce the complexity, here we propose a new two-step adaptive search range decision by developing a combination of previous algorithm. The first step of our adaptive search range decision determines the search range for current MB according to the motion vectors of the previous MBs. In the second step, the motion vector obtained in the current frame is used to adaptively searching the window size of the previous reference frame for multi-frame motion estimation. As such, only a subset of inter- and intra-modes is chosen for RDO calculation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the total encoding cost with negligible loss in PSNR and a slightly increase in the required bitrate, when compared to our previous algorithm and other algorithms reported in the literature.

With the recent advance of Web and its associated technologies, information sharing on distribute computing environments has gained a great amount of attention from many researchers in many application areas, such as medicine, engineering, and business. One basic requirement of distributed medical consultation systems is that geographically dispersed, disparate participants are allowed to exchange information readily with each other. Such software also needs to be supported on a broad range of computer platforms to increase the softwares accessibility. In this paper, the development of world-wide-web based medical consultation system for radiology imaging is addressed to provide platform independence and greater accessibility. The system supports sharing of 3-dimensional objects. We use VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which is the defacto standard in 3-D modeling on the Web. 3-D objects are reconstructed from CT or MRI volume data using a VRML format, which can be viewed and manipulated easily in Web-browsers with a VRML plug-in. A Marching cubes method is used in the transformation of scanned volume data sets to polygonal surfaces of VRML. A decimation algorithm is adopted to reduce the number of meshes in the resulting VRML file. 3-D volume data are often very large in size, hence loading the data on PC level computers requires a significant reduction of the size of the data, while minimizing the loss of the original shape information. This is also important to decrease network delays. A prototype system has been implemented (http://cybernet5.snu.ac.kr/-cyber/mrivrml .html), and several sessions of experiments are carried out.

A major complaint of individuals with normal hearing and hearing impairments is a reduced ability to understand speech in a noisy environment. This paper is proposed to remove the noise from the speech signal in various real time environments and to make the hearing impaired to understand the information by transforming speech in to text format. The quality of audio signal can be improved by filtering the degraded speech signal through adaptive filters. For Noise cancellation widrow & hoff’s Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithms are being used for simplicity in implementation. The LMS algorithm was simple in it's derivation and robust in a number of applications but it also have limitation in selection of a certain values such as step size and results in computational complexity. Hence to overcome all the limitations and to present an enhanced speech signal, a novel approach named VSSNDLMS algorithm is proposed. The performance of algorithms like Variable Step Size Normalised LMS , Normalised Differential LMS with proposed VSSNDLMS with different input signals are analysed in this paper . Finally, through simulation results the proposed VSSNDLMS algorithm converges fastly with minimum mean square error and it is useful in predicting the adaptive filter performance of various algorithms and the implementation indicate the improvement in quality of the speech signal and it appears to be favourable for hearing impaired. Keywords: VSSNDLMS, LMS Algorithm, Noise Cancellation, Speech Processing, Adaptive Filter

The mesh is an architecture that has many scientific applications, and matrix transpose is an important permutation frequently performed in various techniques involving systems of linear equations. In this paper, we present an optimal algorithm for performing matrix transpose on meshes that support wormhole switching. If N is even, our algorithm takes (The equation is abbreviated) communication steps to perform matrix transpose on an N×N mesh and requires only 3 more steps when the routing is restricted to XY routing, which is supported by most commercial mesh-connected parallel computers. The lower bound is (The equation is abbreviated) and the best previous bound is about N/3.27. The complexity of our algorithm almost matches the lower bound. Furthermore, our algorithm is simple and can be implemented on current mesh-connected parallel computers.

The study aimed to establish the precision of linear measurements taken on 3D models of human mandibles created by computed tomography and to compare the measurement error with the one obtained for the corresponding measurements taken directly on the dry mandibles. Ten mandibles were scanned through computed tomography. The polygonal models in STL format were generated using VG Studio Max 2.2 software. Ten linear measurements were taken on both dry mandibles and 3D models. The conventional measurements of the mandibles were taken with a digital caliper and the digital measurements were accomplished on the 3D models using the software Geomagic Verify Viewer. All parameters were measured twice by two observers. The intra- and interobserver measurement error was estimated using the technical error of measurement and the reliability of the mandibular measurements was assessed with the coefficient of reliability. All digital measurements showed acceptable measurement error. According to the coefficients of reliability, most of the digital measurements had values above 0.95, indicating high reliability.