Prof. Ed Chien has introduced a new CS Topics course (CAS CS 591 C1) on Geometry Processing, to be offered for the first time in Spring 2021.

Course Description: The need for manipulating and analyzing geometric data, in the form of meshes, point clouds, and polygon soups is ubiquitous in many computing applications: graphics for films and gaming, computational fabrication and design, virtual and augmented reality, to name just a few. This has served as fertile ground for the application of ideas from the mathematical fields of differential geometry and topology.

In this course, we will read and discuss research papers in this vein, and students will team up in pairs or triplets to complete a free-form final project that implements or extends some of these works. A portion of the class meetings will be lectures on foundational material, while the rest will consist of student presentations of papers, followed by student-led discussions.

Topics that may be covered include: mesh parametrization, volumetric deformation, spectral processing, applied optimization, discrete notions of curvature, discrete exterior calculus and vector fields, and surface registration and correspondence. Suggestions from students will also be taken into consideration.