Mean curvature flow is the negative gradient flow of volume, so any hypersurface flows through hypersurfaces in the direction of steepest descent for volume and eventually becomes extinct in finite time. Before it becomes extinct, topological changes can occur as it goes through singularities. If the hypersurface is in general or generic position, then we explain what singularities can occur un...

Inspired by recent developments in contraction-based curve skeleton extraction, we formulate the skeletonization problem via mean curvature flow (MCF). While the classical application of MCF is surface fairing, we take advantage of its area-minimizing characteristic to drive the curvature flow towards the extreme so as to collapse the input mesh geometry and obtain a skeletal structure. By anal...

We assign a measure to an upper semicontinuous function which is subharmonic with respect to the mean curvature operator, so that it agrees with the mean curvature of its graph when the function is smooth. We prove that the measure is weakly continuous with respect to almost everywhere convergence. We also establish a sharp Harnack inequality for the minimal surface equation, which is crucial f...

In this paper we explicitly derive a level set formulation for mean curvature flow in a Riemannian metric space. This extends the traditional geodesic active contour framework which is based on conformal flows. Curve evolution for image segmentation can be posed as a Riemannian evolution process where the induced metric is related to the local structure tensor. Examples on both synthetic and re...

In this paper, we generalize White's regularity and structure theory for mean-convex mean curvature flow [45, 46, 48] to the setting with free boundary. A major new challenge in boundary is derive an a priori bound ratio between norm of second fundamental form curvature. We establish such via maximum principle triple-approximation scheme, which combines ideas from Edelen [9], Haslhofer-Hershkov...