A new intrinsic numerical method for PDE on surfaces

Abstract: In this note we shall introduce a simple, effective numerical method for solving partial differential equations for scalar and vector-valued data defined on surfaces. Even though we shall follow the traditional way to approximate the regular surfaces under consideration by triangular meshes, the key idea of our algorithm is to develop an intrinsic and unified way to compute directly the partial derivatives of functions defined on triangular meshes. We shall present examples in computer graphics and image processing applications.