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Fast approximate geodesic paths on triangle mesh

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Abstract

We present a new algorithm to compute a geodesic path over a triangle mesh. Based on Novotni’s propagating wavefront method which is similar to the well known Dijkstra algorithm, we made some improvements which Novotni had missed and we also gave the method to find out the geodesic path which Novotni had not. It can handle both convex and non-convex surfaces or even with boundaries. Experiment results show that our method works very well both in efficiency and precision.

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Correspondence to Jie Tang.

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This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of PRC (No. 60503058, No. 60533080) and the Science and Technology Fund of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Jie Tang received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Southeast University, China, in 1994 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer application from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, in 2000. He was a senior system analyst at E1 Media Co. Ltd, HongKong before he became a postdoctoral researcher at Nanjing University, China in 2003. Currently, he is a associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University, China.

He has published about 20 referenced journal and conference papers. His current research interests include virtual reality, computer graphics and multimedia technologies.

Gang-Shan Wu received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China, in 1988, 1991 and 2000, respectively. He is now a professor of Department of Computer Science of Nanjing University, the director of multimedia computing teaching and researching group, director of Multimedia Computing Lab. He was the principal investigator or co-principal investigator of more than twenty projects sponsored by National 863 Hi-Tech Research and Development Program, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Key Project of Chinese Ministry of Education.

His research interests include multimedia information retrieval, Web information processing and Chinese information processing. He published more than thirty papers in these areas.

Prof. Wu has won second-class and third-class awards of Science and Technology Progress of Jiangsu Province respectively, a third-class award of Science and Technology Progress of the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Fu-Yan Zhang is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Nanjing University, China. He is currently the chair of the Multimedia Computing Institute of Nanjing University.

His research interests include information processing and multimedia. He has published over 100 technical papers in these areas.

Ming-Min Zhang received her B.Sc. degree from Computer Science Dept, Nanjing University in 1990, and the M.Sc. degree from Computer Science and Engineering Department, Zhejiang University in 1995. She is now an associate professor of Computer and Engineering Department, Zhejiang University.

She has published more than 20 papers in recent years. She is the co-author of two books related to computer graphics and multimedia. Her research interests include virtual reality/virtual environment, multi-resolution modeling, real-time rendering, distributed VR, visualization, multimedia and image processing.

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Tang, J., Wu, GS., Zhang, FY. et al. Fast approximate geodesic paths on triangle mesh. Int J Automat Comput 4, 8–13 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-007-0008-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-007-0008-5

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