Mint: Discretely Integrable Moments for Symmetric Frame Fields

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of unconstrained (e.g. not orthogonal or unit) symmetric frame field design in volumes. Our principal contribution is a novel (and theoretically well-founded) local integrability condition for frame fields represented as a triplet of symmetric tensors of second, fourth, and sixth order. We also formulate a novel smoothness energy for this representation. To validate our discritization, we study the problem of seamless parameterization of volumetric objects. We compare against baseline approaches by formulating a smooth, integrable, and approximately octahedral frame objective in our discritization. Our method is the first to solve these problems with automatic placement of singularities while also enforcing a symmetric proxy for local integrability as a hard constraint, achieving significantly higher quality parameterizations, in expectation, relative to other frame field design based approaches.