Biharmonic Coordinates and their Derivatives for Triangular 3D Cages

Abstract

As a natural extension to the harmonic coordinates, the biharmonic coordinates have been found superior for planar shape and image manipulation with an enriched deformation space. However, the 3D biharmonic coordinates and their derivatives have remained unexplored. In this work, we derive closed-form expressions for biharmonic coordinates and their derivatives for 3D triangular cages. The core of our derivation lies in computing the closed-form expressions for the integral of the Euclidean distance over a triangle and its derivatives. The derived 3D biharmonic coordinates not only fill a missing component in methods of generalized barycentric coordinates but also pave the way for various interesting applications in practice, including producing a family of biharmonic deformations, solving variational shape deformations, and even unlocking the closed-form expressions for recently-introduced Somigliana coordinates for both fast and accurate evaluations.