July 2004

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Ping Fu, the CEO of Raindrop Geomagic gave a talk at the last DIMACS Workshop on Surface reconstruction (in which I participated) where she emphasized applications and challenges for the industry.

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Surface/abstracts.html#fu

Here is a summary of the main points she made (this is the company co-founded by her husband, prof. Edelsbrunner)

http://www.geomagic.com/company/about.us/

Where are the $$$ to make in this industry:

1. When there is no 3D model.
    
2. When the model deviates from the reality (e.g., errors in the mesh).
    
3. Free-form objects.
    

Real-life constraints:

• 50 million points
   
• minutes not hours
   
• automatic
  
• deal with holes (missing data), and/or bad raw data (noise, errors).
   

Research topics:

1. Coarse alignment (of different scans) automated.
    
2. Geometry assisted scanning (sensor planning: where to move next to acquire more data)
   • where to go
   • what angle
   • scale
      
3. Low density data
   • reconstruct sharp edges
   • noise reduction without shrinkage
   • reconstruct thin-wall parts
   • hole filling
      
4. Mesh quality
   • surface smoothing without loosing size and shape
   • mesh improvements for large data sets
      
5. Parameterization
   • quality of quad meshes
      
6. Features, primitives extraction
    
7. (3D) Texture maps with $x,y,z$
    

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Last Updated: July 23, 2004