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We investigate central issues such as invertibility, stability, synchronization, and frequency characteristics for nonlinear wavelet transforms built using the lifting framework. The nonlinearity comes from adaptively choosing between a class of linear predictors within the lifting framework. We also describe how earlier families of nonlinear filter banks can be extended through the use of prediction functions operating on a causal neighborhood of pixels. Preliminary compression results for model and real-world images demonstrate the promise of our techniques., Published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, v12 n12 p1449-1459, Dec 2003.

A hybrid mesh is a multiresolution surface representation that combines advantages from regular and irregular meshes. Irregular operations allow a hybrid mesh to change topology throughout the hierarchy and approximate detailed features at multiple scales. A preponderance of regular refinements allows for efficient data-structures and processing algorithms. We provide a user driven procedure for creating a hybrid mesh from scanned geometry and present a progressive hybrid mesh compression algorithm.

We propose a new progressive compression scheme for arbitrary topology, highly detailed and densely sampled meshes arising from geometry scanning. We observe that meshes consist of three distinct components: geometry, parameter, and connectivity information. The latter two do not contribute to the reduction of error in a compression setting. Using semi-regular meshes, parameter and connectivity information can be virtually eliminated. Coupled with semi-regular wavelet transforms, zerotree coding, and subdivision based reconstruction we see improvements in error by a factor four (12dB) compared to other progressive coding schemes.

Normal meshes are new fundamental surface descriptions inspired by differential geometry. A normal mesh is a multiresolution mesh where each level can be written as a normal offset from a coarser version. Hence the mesh can be stored with a single float per vertex. We present an algorithm to approximate any surface arbitrarily closely with a normal semi-regular mesh. Normal meshes can be useful in numerous applications such as compression, filtering, rendering, texturing, and modeling.

We construct signal constellations for differential transmission with multiple basestation antennas. The signals are derived using the theory of fixed-point-free groups and are especially suitable for mobile cellular applications because they do not require the handset to have more than one antenna or to know the time-varying propagation environment. Yet we achieve full transmitter diversity and excellent performance gains over a single-antenna system.

Multiple antennas can greatly increase the data rate and reliability of a wireless communication link in a fading environment, but the practical success of using multiple antennas depends crucially on our ability to design high-rate space-time constellations with low encoding and decoding complexity. It has been shown that full transmitter diversity, where the constellation is a set of unitary matrices whose differences have nonzero determinant, is a desirable property for good performance. We use the powerful theory of fixed-point-free groups and their representations to design high-rate constellations with full diversity. Furthermore, we thereby classify all full-diversity constellations that form a group, for all rates and numbers of transmitter antennas. The group structure makes the constellations especially suitable for differential modulation and low-complexity decoding algorithms. The classification also reveals that the number of different group structures with full diversity is very limited when the number of transmitter antennas is large and odd. We therefore also consider extensions of the constellation designs to nongroups. We conclude by showing that many of our designed constellations perform excellently on both simulated and real wireless channels.

Wavelets have been making an appearance in many pure and applied areas of science and engineering. Computer graphics with its many and varied computational problems has been no exception to this rule. In these notes we will attempt to motivate and explain the basic ideas behind wavelets and what makes them so successful in application areas.

We present a new method for user controlled morphing of two homeomorphic triangle meshes of arbitrary topology. In particular we focus on the problem of establishing a correspondence map between source and target meshes. Our method employs the MAPS algorithm to parameterize both meshes over simple base domains and an additional harmonic map bringing the latter into correspondence. To control the mapping the user specifies any number of feature pairs, which control the parameterizations produced by the MAPS algorithm. Additional controls are provided through a direct manipulation interface allowing the user to tune the mapping between the base domains. We give several examples of æsthetically pleasing morphs which can be created in this manner with little user input. Additionally we demonstrate examples of temporal and spatial control over the morph.

We generalize basic signal processing tools such as downsampling, upsampling, and filters to irregular connectivity triangle meshes. This is accomplished through the design of a non-uniform relaxation procedure whose weights depend on the geometry and we show its superiority over existing schemes whose weights depend only on connectivity. This is combined with known mesh simplification methods to build subdivision and pyramid algorithms. We demonstrate the power of these algorithms through a number of application examples including smoothing, enhancement, editing, and texture mapping.

We examine the central issues invertibility, stability, artifacts, and frequency-domain characteristics in the construction of non-linear analogs of the wavelet transform. The lifting framework for wavelet construction motivates our analysis and provides new insight into the problem. We describe a new type of non-linearity for use in constructing non-linear transforms: a set of linear predictors that are chosen adaptively using a non-linear selection function. We also describe how earlier families of non-linear filter banks can be extended through the use of prediction functions operating on a causal neighborhood. We present preliminary results for a synthetic test image., Supported in part by ONR.

We describe a multiresolution representation for meshes based on subdivision, which is a natural extension of the existing patch-based surface representations. Combining subdivision and the smoothing algorithms of Taubin [26] allows us to construct a set of algorithms for interactive multiresolution editing of complex hierarchical meshes of arbitrary topology. The simplicity of the underlying algorithms for refinement and coarsification enables us to make them local and adaptive, thereby considerably improving their efficiency. We have built a scalable interactive multiresolution editing system based on such algorithms.