High-Order Directional Fields

Abstract

We introduce a framework for representing face-based directional fields of an arbitrary piecewise-polynomial order. Our framework is based on a primal-dual decomposition of fields, where the exact component of a field is the gradient of piecewise-polynomial conforming function, and the coexact component is defined as the adjoint of a dimensionally-consistent discrete curl operator. Our novel formulation sidesteps the difficult problem of constructing high-order non-conforming function spaces, and makes it simple to harness the flexibility of higher-order finite elements for directional-field processing. Our representation is structure-preserving, and draws on principles from finite-element exterior calculus. We demonstrate its benefits for applications such as Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition, smooth PolyVector fields, the vector heat method, and seamless parameterization.