Spectral mesh deformation

In this paper, we present a novel spectral method for mesh deformation based on manifold harmonics transform. The eigenfunctions of the Laplace–Beltrami operator give orthogonal bases for parameterizing the space of functions defined on the surfaces. The geometry and motion of the original irregular meshes can be compactly encoded using the low-frequency spectrum of the manifold harmonics. Using the spectral method, the size of the linear deformation system can be significantly reduced to achieve interactive computational speed for manipulating large triangle meshes. Our experimental results demonstrate that only a small spectrum is needed to achieve undistinguishable deformations for large triangle meshes. The spectral mesh deformation approach shows great performance improvement on computational speed over its spatial counterparts.