Research

The focus of our research activities is on geometry processing, which is concerned with the efficient acquisition, representation, optimization, editing, and simulation of geometric objects. As an inherently interdisciplinary research field it combines concepts from computer graphics and computer science, applied mathematics and physics, mechanics, and engineering. Thanks to the growing availability of geometry acquisition devices, such as 3D laser scanners, time-of-flight depth cameras, and medical imaging, geometry processing plays an important role in a large variety of applications. Examples include classical computer-aided design, interactive shape editing, and physically-based simulation for medical applications or movie productions. The fact that many problems arising in these highly diverse fields follow the same fundamental geometric principles proves geometry processing to be a fascinating research field of high potential impact.

Below we present a short overview our research activities. For further details please contact us and take a closer look at our publication page. If you are interested in getting started in geometry processing, check out our book on Polygon Mesh Processing.

Virtual Faces

The face is a crucial aspect of virtual characters, since humans are extremely sensitive to artifacts in either the geometry, the textures, or the animation. This makes scanning, modeling, and stylization of human faces a very challending research topic. [See more]

Real-Time Hand Tracking

Recovering the full articulation of human hands from sensor data is a challenging problem due to the hand's high number of degrees of freedom, the complexity of its motions, and artifacts in the input sensor data. We investigated various different approaches for hand tracking and developed systems that are capable of real-time posture estimation and tracking of human hands based on RGBD input data. [See more]

Interactive Shape Deformation

Interactive deformation is an important aspect of geometry processing, used for instance in CAD/CAGD and the movie industry. In our work, shape manipulation is driven by a variational optimization, which guarantees high quality deformations by minimizing physically-inspired energies subject to user-controlled constraints. [See more]

Point-Based Graphics

Point-based geometry representations allow to process and visualize 3D models without the need for costly surface reconstruction or triangulation, and therefore connstitute a flexible and efficient alternative to traditional mesh-based representations. In addition, point-based rendering is also a highly efficient technique for molecular visualization. [See more]

Mesh Generation & Optimization

Engineering applications and numerical simulations require a faithful approximation of the involved geometric models. In the case of technical data sets, sharp or highly curved edges and corners carry crucial shape information and therefore have to be represented accurately, which can be achieved by aligning the tessellation to the surface geometry. Furthermore, the robustness of numerical simulations strongly depends on the shape of elements in the surface or volume tessellation. [See more]

Physics-Based Simulation

The simulation of dynamic elastic deformation is an important tool for animating virtual models in a realistic manner, e.g. for virtual reality applications or feature films. The involved PDEs are typically discretized using FEM with tetrahedral or hexahedral elements. We provide more flexible generalized FEM models which considerably simplify topological changes of the simulation domain, such as fracture, cutting, and adaptive refinement. [See more]