Atomic Images - A Method For Meshing Digital Images

By combining a digital image with a lattice of points called atoms, in which atom coordinates are computed to minimize a potential energy function of the combination, we obtain a mesh suitable for further computations, such as flow simulation. Each atom in the lattice contributes a potential function to an atomic potential field. The image represents another potential field. Total potential energy of the lattice is a weighted sum of the atomic and image potential fields, evaluated at atom coordinates. We exploit the uniform sampling of images to obtain a simple and efficient algorithm for computing the total potential energy. Beginning with a pseudo-regular lattice, a generic optimization algorithm moves atoms to minimize this total potential energy. After lattice optimization (not before), we connect the atoms to form a mesh that tends to be aligned with image features.