Geometry seam carving

• Mesh deformation with preservation of salient features.
• Transfer of the concept of seam carving from images to 3D meshes.
• Combination of elastic mesh editing with a novel discrete mesh deformation approach.
• Adaptation of the surface tessellation to the degree of the deformation distortion.

We present a novel approach to feature-aware mesh deformation. Previous mesh editing methods are based on an elastic deformation model and thus tend to uniformly distribute the distortion in a least-squares sense over the entire deformation region. Recent results from image resizing, however, show that discrete local modifications such as deleting or adding connected seams of image pixels in regions with low saliency lead to far superior preservation of local features compared to uniform scaling — the image retargeting analog to least-squares mesh deformation. Hence, we propose a discrete mesh editing scheme that combines elastic as well as plastic deformation (in regions with little geometric detail) by transferring the concept of seam carving from image retargeting to the mesh deformation scenario. A geometry seam consists of a connected strip of triangles within the mesh’s deformation region. By collapsing or splitting the interior edges of this strip, we perform a deletion or insertion operation that is equivalent to image seam carving and can be interpreted as a local plastic deformation. We use a feature measure to rate the geometric saliency of each triangle in the mesh and a well-adjusted distortion measure to determine where the current mesh distortion asks for plastic deformations, i.e., for deletion or insertion of geometry seams. Precomputing a fixed set of low-saliency seams in the deformation region allows us to perform fast seam deletion and insertion operations in a predetermined order such that the local mesh modifications are properly restored when a mesh editing operation is (partially) undone. Geometry seam carving hence enables the deformation of a given mesh in a way that causes stronger distortion in homogeneous mesh regions while salient features are preserved much better.