Anisotropic diffusion of surfaces and functions on surfaces

We present a unified anisotropic geometric diffusion PDE model for smoothing (fairing) out noise both in triangulated two-manifold surface meshes in IR3 and functions defined on these surface meshes, while enhancing curve features on both by careful choice of an anisotropic diffusion tensor. We combine the C-1 limit representation of Loop's subdivision for triangular surface meshes and vector functions on the surface mesh with the established diffusion model to arrive at a discretized version of the diffusion problem in the spatial direction. The time direction discretization then leads to a sparse linear system of equations. Iteratively solving the sparse linear system yields a sequence of faired (smoothed) meshes as well as faired functions.