An Approach to Quad Meshing Based on Harmonic Cross-Valued Maps and the Ginzburg-Landau Theory

A generalization of vector fields, referred to as N -direction fields or cross fields when N = 4, has been recently introduced and studied for geometry processing, with applications in quadrilateral (quad) meshing, texture mapping, and parameterization. We make the observation that cross field design for two-dimensional quad meshing is related to the well-known GinzburgLandau problem from mathematical physics. This identification yields a variety of theoretical tools for efficiently computing boundary-aligned quad meshes, with provable guarantees on the resulting mesh, for example, the number of mesh defects and bounds on the defect locations. The procedure for generating the quad mesh is to (i) find a complex-valued “representation” field that minimizes the Dirichlet energy subject to a boundary constraint, (ii) convert the representation field into a boundary-aligned, smooth cross field, (iii) use separatrices of the cross field to partition the domain into four sided regions, and (iv) mesh each of these four-sided regions using standard techniques. Under certain assumptions on the geometry of the domain, we prove that this procedure can be used to produce a cross field whose separatrices partition the domain into four sided regions. To solve the energy minimization problem for the representation field, we use an extension of the MerrimanBence-Osher (MBO) threshold dynamics method, originally conceived as an algorithm to simulate motion by mean curvature, to minimize the Ginzburg-Landau energy for the optimal representation field. Finally, we demonstrate the method on a variety of test domains.