Surface Estimation - matlab

TL;DR - How do I only analyse the surface data points for surface estimation?
I have a 3D object, and I would like to estimate the surface shape.
The problem is: MATLAB curve fitting toolbox takes into account all the data points of the object. See the example of a cylinder and it's approximated polynomial. MATLAB is taking into account all the data points for surface estimation, what can I do to over come this?

Assuming that the outer and inner surface have identical shape, you can first do an imfill to make the object solid and then use morphological skeleton, bwmorph(BW,'skel',Inf) to turn it into a single line, which you then can approximate the shape from.

Related

Smoothing algorithm, 2.5D

The picture below shows a triangular surface mesh. Its vertices are exactly on the surface of the original 3D object but the straight edges and faces have of course some geometric error where the original surface bends and I need some algorithm to estimate the smooth original surface.
Details: I have a height field of (a projectable part of) this surface (a 2.5D triangulation where each x,y pair has a unique height z) and I need to compute the height z of arbitrary x,y pairs. For example the z-value of the point in the image where the cursor points to.
If it was a 2D problem, I would use cubic splines but for surfaces I'm not sure what is the best solution.
As commented by #Darren what you need are patches.
It can be bi-linear patches or bi-quadratic or Coon's patches or other.
I have found no much reference doing a quick search but this links:
provide an overview: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs4620/2013fa/lectures/17surfaces.pdf
while this is more technical: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~dfg/graphics/graphics2010/GraphicsHandout05.pdf
The concept is that you calculate splines along the edges (height function with respect to the straight edge segment itself) and then make a blending inside the surface delimited by the edges.
The patch os responsible for the blending meaning that inside any face you have an height which is a function of the point position coordinates inside the face and the values of the spline ssegments which are defined on the edges of the same face.
As per my knowledge it is quite easy to use this approach on a quadrilateral mesh (because it becomes easy to define on which edges sequence to do the splines) while I am not sure how to apply if you are forced to go for an actual triangulation.

Calculating mean temperature sphere in Matlab

I solved the temperature profile of a sphere being cooled in a gas stream with pdepe, but the assignment was to calculate at which time the average temperature of the sphere is 16C. Now I used the function mean, but this isn't correct for a sphere. How would one calculate the mean temperature of a sphere?
PDE toolbox functions area() and volume() might help with your case. For a 2D mesh, area() gives the area of each mesh element; one then needs to find the centroid coordinates for the element and interpolate the solution at these coordinates. Similarly, for a 3D mesh and the element volumes. The answer to this question on Mathworks' site also showcases some code that can be used for axisymmetric geometries.
Mean in spherical geometry is usually weighted by radius, the final formula for <f> is as follows: f_mean = 3*trapz(r, r.^2.*f)

pca in matlab - 2D curve stretching

I have N 3D observations taken from an optical motion capture system in XYZ form.
The motion that was captured was just a simple circle arc, derived from a rigid body with fixed axis of rotation.
I used the princomp function in matlab to get all marker points on the same plane i.e. the plane on which the motion has been done.
(See a pic representing 3D data on the plane that was found, below)
What i want to do after the previous step is to look the fitted data on the plane that was found and get the curve of the captured motion in 2D.
In the princomp how to, it is said that
The first two coordinates of the principal component scores give the
projection of each point onto the plane, in the coordinate system of
the plane.
(from "Fitting an Orthogonal Regression Using Principal Components Analysis" article on mathworks help site)
So i thought that if i just plot those pc scores -plot(score(:,1),score(:,2))- i'll get the motion curve. Instead what i got is this.
(See a pic representing curve data in 2D derived from pc scores, below)
The 2d curve seems stretched and nonlinear (different y values for same x values) when it shouldn't be. The curve that i am looking for, should be interpolated by just using simple polynomial (polyfit) or circle fit in matlab.
Is this happening because the plane that was found looks like rhombus relative to the original coordinate system and the pc axes are rotated with respect to the basis of plane in such way that produce this stretch?
Then i thought that, this is happening because of the different coordinate systems of optical system and Matlab. Optical system's (ie cameras) co.sys. is XZY oriented and Matlab's default (i think) co.sys is XYZ oriented. I transformed my data to correspond to Matlab's co.sys through a rotation matrix, run again princomp but i got the same stretch in the 2D curve (the new curve just had different orientation now).
Somewhere else i read that
Principal Components Analysis chooses the first PCA axis as that line
that goes through the centroid, but also minimizes the square of the
distance of each point to that line. Thus, in some sense, the line is
as close to all of the data as possible. Equivalently, the line goes
through the maximum variation in the data. The second PCA axis also
must go through the centroid, and also goes through the maximum
variation in the data, but with a certain constraint: It must be
completely uncorrelated (i.e. at right angles, or "orthogonal") to PCA
axis 1.
I know that i am missing something but i have a problem understanding why i get a stretched curve. What i have to do so i can get the curve right?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Here is a sample data file (3 columns XYZ coords for 2 markers)
w w w.sendspace.com/file/2hiezc

Plot 3D surface that is not the graph of a function

I have a 3D data set of a surface that is not a function graph. The data is just a bunch of points in 3D, and the only thing I could think of was to try scatter3 in Matlab. Surf will not work since the surface is not a function graph.
Using scatter3 gave a not so ideal result since there is no perspective/shading of any sort.
Any thoughts? It does not have to be Matlab, but that is my go-to source for plotting.
To get an idea of the type of surface I have, consider the four images:
The first is a 3D contour plot, the second is a slice in a plane {z = 1.8} of the contour. My goal is to pick up all the red areas. I have a method to do this for each slice {z = k}. This is the 3rd plot, and I like what I see here a lot.
Iterating this over z give will give a surface, which is the 4th plot, which is a bit noisy (though I have ideas to reduce the noise...). If I plot just the black surface using scatter3 without the contour all I get is a black indistinguishable blob, but for every slice I get a smooth curve, and I have noticed that the curves vary pretty smoothly when I adjust z.
Some fine-tuning will give a much better 4th plot, but still, even if I get the 4th plot to have no noise at all, the result using scatter3 will be a black incomprehensible blob when plotted alone and not on top of the 3D contour. I would like to get a nice picture of the full surface that is not plotted on top of the 3D contour plot
In fact, just to compare and show how bad scatter3 is for surfaces, even if you had exact points on a sphere and used scatter3 the result would be a black blob, and wouldn't even look like a sphere
Can POV-Ray handle this? I've never used it...
If you have a triangulation of your points, you could consider using the trisurf function. I have used that before to generate closed surfaces that have no boundary (such as polyhedra and spheres). The downside is that you have to generate a triangulation of your points. This may not be ideal to your needs but it definitely an option.
EDIT: As #High Performance Mark suggests, you could try using delaunay to generate a triangulation in Matlab
just wanted to follow up on this question. A quick nice way to do this in Matlab is the following:
Consider the function d(x, y, z) defined as the minimum distance from (x, y, z) to your data set. Make sure d(x, y, z) is defined on some grid that contains the data set you're trying to plot.
Then use isosurface to plot a (some) countour(s) of d(x, y, z). For me plotting the contour 0.1 of d(x, y ,z) was enough: Matlab will plot a nice looking surface of all points within a distance 0.1 of the data set with good lighting and all.
In povray, a blob object could be used to display a very dense collection of points, if you make them centers of spheres.
http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/3.6.1/71/
If you want to be able to make slices of "space" and have them colored as per your data, then maybe the object pattern (based on a #declared blob object) might do the trick.
Povray also has a way to work with df3 files, which I've never worked with, but this user appears to have done something similar to your visualization.
http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/df3/

plot a set of 3D data in different angles in MATLAB

I have a formula that depends on theta and phi (spherical coordinates 0<=theta<=2*pi and 0<=phi<=pi). By inserting each engle, I obtained a quantity. Now I have a set of data for different angles and I need to plot the surface. My data is a 180*360 matrix, so I am not sure if I can use SURF or MESH or PLOT3. The figure should be a surface that include all data and the axes should be in terms of the quantity, not the quantity versus the angles. How can I plot such a surface?
I see no reason why you cannot use mesh or surf to plot such data. Another option I tend to use is that of density plots. You basically display the dependent variable (quantity) as an image and include the independent variables (angles) along the axis, much like you would with the aforementioned 3D plotting functions. This can be done with imagesc.
Typically you would want your axes to be the dependent variables. Could you elaborate more on this point?
If I understand you correctly you have calculated a function f(theta,phi) and now you want to plot the surface containing all the points with the polar coordinated (r,theta,phi) where r=f(theta,phi).
If this is what you want to do, the 2D version of such a plot is included in MATLAB under the name polar. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, polar3 on MatlabCentral is not the generalization you are looking for.
I have been able to plot a sphere with the following code, using constant r=1. You can give it a try with your function:
phi1=0:1/(3*pi):pi; %# this would be your 180 points
theta1=-pi:1/(3*pi):pi; % your 360 points
r=ones(numel(theta1),numel(phi1));
[phi,theta]=meshgrid(phi1,theta1);
x=r.*sin(theta).*cos(phi);
y=r.*sin(theta).*sin(phi);
z=r.*cos(theta);
tri=delaunay(x(:),y(:),z(:));
trisurf(tri,x,y,z);
From my tests it seems that delaunay also includes a lot of triangles which go through the volume of my sphere, so it seems this is not optimal. So maybe you can have a look at fill3 and construct the triangles it draws itself: as a first approximation, you could have the points [x(n,m) x(n+1,m) x(n,m+1)] combined into one triangle, and [x(n+1,m) x(n+1,m+1) x(n+1,m+1)] into another...?