Spectral Methods for Mesh Processing and Analysis

Abstract

Spectral methods for mesh processing and analysis rely on the eigenvalues, eigenvectors, or eigenspace projections derived from appropriately defined mesh operators to carry out desired tasks. Early works in this area can be traced back to the seminal paper by Taubin in 1995, where spectral analysis of mesh geometry based on a combinatorial Laplacian aids our understanding of the low-pass filtering approach to mesh smoothing. Over the past ten years or so, the list of applications in the area of geometry processing which utilize the eigenstructures of a variety of mesh operators in different manners have been growing steadily. Many works presented so far draw parallels from developments in fields such as graph theory, computer vision, machine learning, graph drawing, numerical linear algebra, and high-performance computing. This state-of-the-art report aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the spectral approach, focusing on its power and versatility in solving geometry processing problems and attempting to bridge the gap between relevant research in computer graphics and other fields. Necessary theoretical background will be provided and existing works will be classified according to different criteria - the operators or eigenstructures employed, application domains, or the dimensionality of the spectral embeddings used - and described in adequate length. Finally, despite much empirical success, there still remain many open questions pertaining to the spectral approach, which we will discuss in the report as well.