Patent · US Expired

Apparatus for producing a flattening map of a digitized image for conformally mapping onto a surface and associated method

US6697538B1 · kind B1 · utility

30Cited by
15References
20Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateJul 28, 2000
Grant dateFeb 24, 2004
Priority date
Expiry dateMar 30, 2022

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06T2219/021
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A computerized apparatus and associated method and program code on a storage medium, for producing a flattening map of a digitized image. This image may be initially synthetically produced as discrete data or as quasi-discrete image data of a real object—and the original image data may be stored as two-, three-, or four-dimensional dynamic coordinate data. Once produced, the flattening map can be conformally mapped onto the computer generated surface (whether 2-D, 3-D, or any of the dynamically-varying family of surfaces) for display on a computer-assisted display apparatus in communication with a processor. The apparatus and associated method and program code include constructing a first set of data comprising a plurality of discrete surface-elements to represent at least a portion of a surface of the digitized image, and performing a flattening function on the first set of data to produce the flattening map. The flattening function includes computing, for each discrete surface-element, a solution to each of two systems of linear equations formulated from finding a numerical solution to a selected partial differential equation (PDE), and can be performed on each of a series …

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.