Interaktive Modellierung dynamischer 3D-Flächen

Geometric Modelling is the discipline within Computer Graphics, which is concerned with describing and processing 3D surfaces. Over the last 15 years, a lot of methods for efficiently processing (e.g., interactive editing, compression, subdivision) static 3D surfaces (in particular, triangle meshes) were developed. However, some applications (e.g. animation, simulation) are based on dynamic 3D surfaces, that is, surfaces with time-varying geometry and topology. Currently, such surfaces are usually treated in a discrete way as a finite set of static 3D surfaces, and hence they are usually processed independently of each other with known algorithms. The fundamental idea of this project is to rather consider dynamic 3D surfaces as an entire and continuous 4D object and to gain advantages from this point of view. The main goal of the project is to develop methods for processing this kind of data, in particular for interactive modelling. This poses a number of interesting problems, including the reconstruction from given discrete data, the handling of topological changes, and the development of novel data structures for representing and efficiently visualizing this kind of data. We plan to verify the effectiveness of these methods using real data, in particular from 3D cameras.