Atomic Images - A Method For Meshing Digital Images

Proceedings, 10th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.185-196, October 7-10 2001

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

10th International Meshing Roundtable
Newport Beach, California, U.S.A.
October 7-10, 2001

Landmark Graphics, Englewood, CO, USA
Email: dhale@lgc.com

Abstract
By combining a digital image with a lattice of points called atoms, in which atom coordinates are computed to minimize a potential energy function of the combination, we obtain a mesh suitable for further computations, such as flow simulation.

Each atom in the lattice contributes a potential function to an atomic potential field. The image represents another potential field. Total potential energy of the lattice is a weighted sum of the atomic and image potential fields, evaluated at atom coordinates. We exploit the uniform sampling of images to obtain a simple and efficient algorithm for computing the total potential energy.

Beginning with a pseudo-regular lattice, a generic optimization algorithm moves atoms to minimize this total poten- tial energy. After lattice optimization (not before), we connect the atoms to form a mesh that tends to be aligned with image features.

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