Barycentric Coordinates on Surfaces
Abstract
This paper introduces a method for defining and efficiently computing barycentric coordinates with respect to polygons on general surfaces. Our construction is geared towards injective polygons (polygons that can be enclosed in a metric ball of an appropriate size) and is based on replacing the linear precision property of planar coordinates by a requirement in terms of center of mass, and generalizing this requirement to the surface setting. We show that the resulting surface barycentric coordinates can be computed using planar barycentric coordinates with respect to a polygon in the tangent plane. We prove theoretically that the surface coordinates properly generalize the planar coordinates and carry some of their useful properties such as unique reconstruction of a point given its coordinates, uniqueness for triangles, edge linearity, similarity invariance, and smoothness; in addition, these coordinates are insensitive to isometric deformations and can be used to reconstruct isometries. We show empirically that surface coordinates are shape-aware with consistent gross behavior across different surfaces, are well-behaved for different polygon types/locations on variety of surface forms, and that they are fast to compute. Finally, we demonstrate effectiveness of surface coordinates for interpolation, decal mapping, and correspondence refinement.
Description
@article{10.1111:j.1467-8659.2010.01759.x,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Barycentric Coordinates on Surfaces}},
author = {Raif M. Rustamov},
year = {2010},
publisher = {},
DOI = {10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01759.x}
}