Morse theory shows how the topology of an implicit surface is affected by its function's critical points, whereas catastrophe theory shows how these critical points behave as the function's parameters change. Interval analysis finds the critical points, and they can also be tracked efficiently during parameter changes. Changes in the function value at these critical points cause changes in the topology. Techniques for modifying the polygonization to accommodate such changes in topology are given. These techniques are robust enough to guarantee the topology of an implicit surface polygonization, and are efficient enough to maintain this guarantee during interactive modeling. The impact of this work is a topologically-guaranteed polygonization technique, and the ability to directly and accurately manipulate polygonized implicit surfaces in real time.

The reliable prediction of phase stability is a challenging computational problem in chemical process simulation, optimization and design. The phase stability problem can be formulated either as a minimization problem or as an equivalent nonlinear equation solving problem. Conventional solution methods are initialization dependent, and may fail by converging to trivial or non-physical solutions or to a point that is a local but not global minimum. Thus there has been considerable recent interest in developing more reliable techniques for stability analysis. Recently we have demonstrated, using cubic equation of state models, a technique that can solve the phase stability problem with complete reliability. The technique, which is based on interval analysis, is initialization independent, and if properly implemented provides a mathematical guarantee that the correct solution to the phase stability problem has been found. However, there is much room for improvement in the computational efficiency of the technique. In this paper we consider two means of enhancing the efficiency of the method, both based on sharpening the range of interval function evaluations. Results indicate that by using the enhanced method, computation times can be reduced by nearly an order of magnitude in some cases.

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. We discuss adaptive enumeration and rendering methods for implicit surfaces, using octrees computed with affine arithmetic, a new tool for range analysis. Affine arithmetic is similar to standard interval arithmetic, but takes into account correlations between operands and sub-formulas, generally providing much tighter bounds for the computed quantities. The resulting octrees are accordingly much smaller, and the rendering faster. We also describe applications of affine arithmetic to intersection and ray tracing of implicit surfaces. keywords: cellular models, interval analysis, rendering, implicit surfaces. 1 Introduction Implicit surfaces have recently become popular in computer graphics and solid modeling. In order to exploit existing hardware and algorithms, it is often necessary to approximate such surfaces by models with simpler geometry, such as polygonal meshes or voxel arrays. Let S be a surface defined implicitly by the equation h(x; y; z) = 0. A simple and general techn...

This paper compares the performance and e#ciency of di#erent function range interval methods for plotting f(x, y) = 0 on a rectangular region based on a subdivision scheme, where f(x, y) is a polynomial. The solution of this problem has many applications in CAGD.

: There have been many proposals for adding sound implementations of numeric processing to Prolog. This paper describes an approach to numeric constraint processing which has been implemented in Echidna, a new constraint logic programming (CLP) language. Echidna uses consistency algorithms which can actively process a wider variety of numeric constraints than most other CLP systems, including constraints containing some common non-linear functions. A unique feature of Echidna is that it implements domains for real-valued variables with hierarchical data structures and exploits this structure using a hierarchical arc consistency algorithm specialized for numeric constraints. This gives Echidna two advantages over other systems. First, the union of disjoint intervals can be represented directly. Other approaches require trying each disjoint interval in turn during backtrack search. Second, the hierarchical structure facilitates varying the precision of constraint processing. Consequently...

. Interval branch and bound algorithms for finding all roots use a combination of a computational existence / uniqueness procedure and a tesselation process (generalized bisection). Such algorithms identify, with mathematical rigor, a set of boxes that contains unique roots and a second set within which all remaining roots must lie. Though each root is contained in a box in one of the sets, the second set may have several boxes in clusters near a single root. Thus, the output is of higher quality if there are relatively more boxes in the first set. In contrast to previously implemented similar techniques, a box expansion technique in this paper, based on using an approximate root finder, ffl-inflation and exact set complementation, decreases the size of the second set, increases the size of the first set, and never loses roots. In addition to the expansion technique, use of second-order extensions to eliminate small boxes that do not contain roots, and interval slopes versus interval d...

We describe a variant of a domain decomposition method proposed by Gleicher and Kass for intersecting and trimming parametric surfaces. Instead of using interval arithmetic to guide the decomposition, the variant described here uses affine arithmetic, a tool recently proposed for range analysis. Affine arithmetic is similar to standard interval arithmetic, but takes into account correlations between operands and sub-formulas, generally providing much tighter bounds for the computed quantities. As a consequence, the quadtree domain decompositions are much smaller and the intersection algorithm runs faster. keywords: surface intersection, trimming surfaces, range analysis, interval analysis, CAGD.

. We consider branch and bound methods for enclosing all unconstrained global minimizers of a nonconvex nonlinear twice-continuously differentiable objective function. In particular, we consider bounds obtained with interval arithmetic, with the "midpoint test," but no acceleration procedures. Unless the lower bound is exact, the algorithm without acceleration procedures in general gives an undesirable cluster of boxes around each minimizer. In a previous paper, we analyzed this problem for univariate objective functions. In this paper, we generalize that analysis to multidimensional objective functions. As in the univariate case, the results show that the problem is highly related to the behavior of the objective function near the global minimizers and to the order of the corresponding interval extension. 1. Introduction and Basic Concepts Our underlying problem is: (1) find all global minimizers to f(x) subject to x 2 X; where X ae R m is a compact right parallelepiped with face...

Search algorithms for solving Numeric CSPs (Constraint Satisfaction Problems) make an extensive use of filtering techniques. In this paper we show how those filtering techniques can be accelerated by discovering and exploiting some regularities during the filtering process. Two kinds of regularities are discussed, cyclic phenomena in the propagation queue and numeric regularities of the domains of the variables. We also present in this paper an attempt to unify numeric CSPs solving methods from two distinct communities, that of CSP in artificial intelligence, and that of interval analysis. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.