In this paper, we introduce a method to apply ideas from electrostatics to parameterize the open space around an object. By simulating the object as
a virtually charged conductor, we can define an object-centric coordinate system which we call Electric Coordinates. It parameterizes the outer space of a reference object in a way analogous to polar coordinates.We also introduce
a measure which quantifies the extent to which an object is wrapped by a surface. This measure can be computed as the electric flux through the wrapping surface due to the electric field around the charged conductor.
The electrostatic parameters, which comprise the Electric Coordinates and flux, have several applications in computer graphics, including: texturing,morphing, meshing, path planning relative to a target object, mesh
parameterization, designing deformable objects, and computing coverage. Our method works for objects of arbitrary geometry and topology, and thus is applicable in a wide variety of scenarios.
Abstract
Resources
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Harmonic parameterization by electrostatics.
 
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).
2013
(Presented in SIGGRAPH 2014)
Journal
 Paper    Video   BibTex @article{wang2013harmonic, author = {He Wang and Kirill A Sidorov and Peter Sandilands and Taku Komura}, title = {Harmonic parameterization by electrostatics}, journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)}, year = {2013} }
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Acknowledgement
The authors thank the reviewers for their constructive comments.They also thank Shin Yoshizawa for the discussion and advice about spherical parameterization. This work is partially supported by EU FP7/TOMSY and EPSRC Standard Grant (EP/H012338/1).The bunny and armadillo models are courtesy of the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository2. The vase and dolphin models are courtesy
of Princeton Shape Benchmark [Shilane et al. 2004]. The suzzane model is courtesy of Blender Foundation3, whose software is distributed under the GNU GPL license.