Facial hexahedral mesh transferring by volumetric mapping based on harmonic fields

Abstract: Hexahedral mesh has obvious mechanical advantages over tetrahedral mesh, but it is no trivial task to generate hexahedral mesh for complex object shapes such as individual faces. This paper presents a novel method to generate patient-specific hexahedral meshes of facial soft tissue models, based on a volumetric cross-parameterization mapping from a standard hexahedral mesh to the individual model. The volumetric parameterization is constructed based on triple of the volumetric harmonic fields, which are adapted to be as close to mutually orthogonal as possible, to achieve some quasi-conformal effect. In addition, some piecewise constraints on the harmonic fields are added to ensure anatomical feature correspondence. Experimental results show that our approach works efficiently for facial soft tissue modeling, avoids element flipping and preserves mesh element angles to a significant extent. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]