A Manifold of Planar Triangular Meshes with Complete Riemannian Metric

Abstract: Shape spaces are fundamental in a variety of applications including image registration, morphing, matching, interpolation, and shape optimization. In this work, we consider two-dimensional shapes represented by triangular meshes of a given connectivity. We show that the collection of admissible configurations representable by such meshes form a smooth manifold. For this manifold of planar triangular meshes we propose a geodesically complete Riemannian metric. It is a distinguishing feature of this metric that it preserves the mesh connectivity and prevents the mesh from degrading along geodesic curves. We detail a symplectic numerical integrator for the geodesic equation in its Hamiltonian formulation. Numerical experiments show that the proposed metric keeps the cell aspect ratios bounded away from zero and thus avoids mesh degradation along arbitrarily long geodesic curves.