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CMSC828Z: Description of Project 4 - Temporally-varying Isosurfaces as Shape Representations

This project is closely related to project 5 and it might be a good idea that the two students who work on projects 4 and 5 closely collaborate. The goal of this project is to examine implicit descriptions of temporally varying shapes with regard to their use in the spatio-temporal reconstruction project. The main advantage of an implicit description is its topology independence. It is important for a general reconstruction system that we do not have to limit ourselves to a certain number of objects or shape complexity (two shaking hands, cutting a potato) that can be observed. Since the topology of the observed can also change over time (hands are let go, flip of a coin and catching it again), it is advantageous if the shape representation naturally allows such changes as it is the case with a volumetric description. For an introduction to implicit shape descriptions see the following references:

• Jules Bloomenthal. Implicit surfaces. In Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Marcel Dekker, Inc., New York, NY, 2002. to appear.
• S.F. Frisken, R.N. Perry, A.P. Rockwood, and T.R. Jones. Adaptively sampled distance fields: A general representation of shape for computer graphics. In Proc. of ACM SIGGRAPH, pages 249-254, 2000.
• J. Pope, S.F. Frisken, and R.N. Perry. Dynamic meshing using adaptively sampled distance fields. In ACM SIGGRAPH, Sketches & Applications, 2001.
• Ross Whitaker and David Breen. Level-set models for the deformation of solid objects. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Implicit Surfaces, pages 19-35. Eurographics Association, June 1998.
• Some useful software: Cambridge Univerity IsoSurf isosurface extraction package