Editorial

The ninth International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications (SMI 2007) took place in the beautiful town of Lyon, France, in June 2007. Since its launch, Shape Modeling and Applications has been characterized by a wide spectrum of research topics related to shape modeling and processing, addressed in various application areas. Since 2001, the SMI conference has become an annual event with the venue changing on a regular basis from Asia to Europe and to North America. Traditionally, it includes the Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Implicit Surfaces as a specific session. The Computer Graphics Society has been the organization behind the SMI conference series, and it is appropriate that we publish a selection of papers in the CGS journal, The Visual Computer. The papers have been carefully revised and additional material added to make them into journal quality papers. The papers reflect some of the diverse subject areas included under the banner of modeling for computer graphics. We start with “Hierarchical part-type segmentation using voxel-based curve skeletons”, which deals with the difficult task of segmenting 3D shapes into meaningful components using a curved skeleton. We then present “Topological correction of hypertextured implicit surfaces for ray casting”, which takes the idea of rendering hypertextures as implicit surfaces, and proposes some solutions for topological problems. We then move on to an improved method for producing a mesh from an iso-surface, “Delaunay meshing of isososurfaces”. “Augmented planar-reflective symmetry transform” is an interesting addition to a growing number of shape retrieval tools, and “Evolution of T-spline level sets for meshing non-uniformly sampled and incomplete data” uses T-spline scalar functions to construct a C2 smooth implicit surface. The problem of identifying sharp features in a point cloud is tackled in “Spline-based feature curves from point-sampled geometry”. The authors present applications of this work, in both surface meshing and pointbased geometry compression. These papers represent the work of a researchers searching for improvements to the field of computer graphics modeling.