Editorial

ARTICLE IN PRESS

0097-8493/$ - se

doi:10.1016/j.ca

Computers & Graphics 30 (2006) 891

www.elsevier.com/locate/cag

Editorial

Recent progress in digital data storage, digital dataacquisition, and modeling techniques have made largerepositories of meshes increasingly more accessible. Meshesare used in numerous application fields of computergraphics including motion pictures, computer games,computer-aided design, medical and engineering. Develop-ing effective techniques for representing, analyzing, search-ing and re-using meshes has become an importantchallenge in computer graphics.

This special issue contains five papers that describeoriginal research in mesh analysis. The collection of papersrepresents the diverse challenging topics in mesh analysis.The first paper presents a meshing algorithm, whichreconstructs a mesh from a point cloud. The next papersassume that the meshes are given and present algorithmsfor hole filling, deformation, and classification.

The first paper by Tewari, Gotsman, and Gortler,proposes a method to mesh a point cloud sampled froma closed manifold of genus 1. Under mild conditions on thesampling density, a closed manifold output with a correcttopology, is guaranteed.

The second paper by Pernot, Moraru, and Veron,proposes a set of methods for hole filling. The completeprocess, from hole detection to the deformation of thetopological grid built from the boundary, is considered.

The next papers present two interesting approached tomesh deformation. The third paper by Yoshioka, Masuda,and Furukawa, proposes a constrained least squaresapproach for deforming mesh models, while satisfyingpositional constraints. This is done by solving a combina-tion of hard and soft constraints.

The fourth paper by Huang, Liu, Bao, Guo, and Shum,describes a physically based approach, which uses the linearelasticity model and a finite element model. The method isbased on a precomputed force–displacement matrix.

The last paper by Ip and Regli, explores classification fordiscriminating manufacturing processes. Unlike the generalclassification problem, this paper focuses on determiningthe best manufacturing process from shape features, usinga novel curvature-based descriptor.

These five papers give a good sample of the overall processinvolved in mesh processing. Starting at acquisition andrepair of meshes, following in modeling and manipulation ofmeshes and ending at enhancing the representation of objectsbeyond mesh geometry using semantics. These are all issueswith many open problems that are exciting to pursue.

e front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Ayellet Tal received the B.Sc. inMathematics and Computer Science(Summa cum Laude) from Tel-AvivUniversity. She received her Ph.D., inComputer Science from PrincetonUniversity. She joined the Departmentof Electrical Engineering at the Tech-nion—Israel Institute of Technology in1997. Her research interests concern

computer graphics, computational geometry, virtual rea-lity, multimedia, and software visualization.

Thomas Funkhouser is an associate pro-fessor in the Department of ComputerScience at Princeton University. Pre-viously, he was a member of the techni-cal staff at Bell Laboratories. His currentresearch interests include interactivecomputer graphics and structural bioin-formatics. He received a B.S. in Biologi-cal Sciences from Stanford University in

1983, a M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1989, and aPh.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1993.

Ariel Shamir received a B.Sc. in Mathe-matics and Computer Science from theHebrew University in 1991, and a Ph.D.in Computer Science in 1999. He spent 2years at the center for computationalvisualization in the University of Austin,Texas, and then joined the computerscience faculty at the interdisciplinarycenter in Herzliya, Israel. Shamir is

currently a visiting scientist at Mitsubishi Electric ResearchLaboratory. His research interests include geometric modeling,computer graphics, virtual reality, and visualization.

Ayellet TalDepartment of Electrical Engineering,

Technion-Israel Inst of Technology, 32000 Haifa, Israel

E-mail address: ayellet@ee.technion.ac.il

Thomas FunkhouserDepartment of Computer Science,

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Ariel ShamirMitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory, USA