Smooth Polylines on Polygon Meshes

Curves on surfaces can be very useful to visualize surface features at low graphical and memory cost. Curves on surfaces are also used for surface segmentation with possible applications to visualization, reconstruction and parameterization of complex surfaces. In this paper a simple and efficient algorithm for building smooth polylines on triangulated 2D-manifold polygonal meshes is introduced. The algorithm combines geometrical optimization with topological modifications in order to iteratively smooth an initial crude polyline. One key feature of this algorithm is that it relies solely on the geometry of the surface and the polyline. Another key feature is that during the smoothing the polylines always stay on the surface. Different smoothing criteria are proposed.