Patching Delaunay Triangles - matlab

I have a number of 2D points x and y, and I need to color delaunay triangles, which have edges that exceed a certain limit. However I can't figure out how to write it down so that it would compare each edge of each triangle and add it to a vector of triangles that need to be patched. The end result is supposed to be a 3D surface, where color depends on the Z coordinate, except for the triangles that have been patched white. Any help would be great!

You can try a contour plot. With your triangles and z values find the average of each triangle.

Related

Extrapolation delaunay triangulation

Shown Figure (1) is a typical Delaunay triangulation (blue) and it has a boundary line (black rectangle).
Each vertex in the Delaunay triangulation has a height value. So I can calculate the height inside convex hull. I am figuring out a method to calculate the height up to the boundary line (some sort of extrapolation).
There are two things associated with this task
Triangulate up to the boundary point
Figuring out the height at newly created triangle vertices
Anybody come across this issue?
Figure 1:
I'd project the convex hull points of the triangulation to the visible box segments and then insert the 4 box corners and the projected points into the triangulation.
There is no unique correct way to assign heights to the new points. One easy and stable method would be to assign to each new point the height of the closest visible convex hull vertex. Be careful with extrapolation: Triangles of the convex hull tend to have unstable slopes, see the large triangles in front of the below terrain image. Their projection to the xy plane has almost 0 area but due to the height difference they are large and almost 90 degrees to the xy plane.
I've had some luck with the following approach:
Find the segment on the convex hull that is closet to the extrapolation point
If I can drop a perpendicular onto the segment, interpolate between the two vertices of the segment.
If I can not construct the perpendicular, just use the closest vertex
This approach results in a continuous surface, but does not provide 1st derivative continuity.
You can find some code that might be helpful at TriangularFacetInterpolator.java. Look for the interpolateWithExteriorSupport method.

I need to fit a best circle to the 3D data in matlab

Basically, I have a many irregular circle on the ground in the form of x,y,z coordinates (of 200*3 matrix). but I want to fix a best circle in to the data of x,y,z coordinates (of 200*3 matrix).
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
I would try using the RANSAC algorithm which finds the parameters of your model (in your case a circle) given noisy data. The algorithm is quite easy to understand and robust against outliers.
The wikipedia article has a Matlab example for fitting a line but it shouldn't be too hard to adapt it to fit a circle.
These slides give a good introduction to the RANSAC algorithm (starting from page 42). They even show examples for fitting a circle.
Though this answer is late, I hope this helps others
To fit a circle to 3d points
Find the centroid of the 3d points (nx3 matrix)
Subtract the centroid from the 3D points.
Using RANSAC, fit a plane to the 3D points. You can refer here for the function to fit plane using RANSAC
Apply SVD to the 3d points (nx3 matrix) and get the v matrix
Generate the axes along the RANSAC plane using the axes from SVD. For example, if the plane norm is along the z-direction, then cross product between the 1st column of v matrix and the plane norm will generate the vector along the y-direction, then the cross product between the generated y-vector and plane norm will generate a vector along the x-direction. Using the generated vectors, form a Rotation matrix [x_vector y_vector z_vector]
Multiply the Rotation matrix with the centroid subtracted 3d points so that the points will be parallel to the XY plane.
Project the points to XY plane by simply removing the Z-axes from the 3d points
fit a circle using Least squares circle fit
Rotate the center of the circle using the inverse of the rotation matrix obtained from step 5
Translate back the center to the original location using the centroid
The circle in 3D will have the center, the radius will be the same as the 2D circle we obtained from step 8, the circle plane will be the RANSAC plane we obtained from step 3

find area of 3D polygon

Given a matrix nx3 that represents n points in 3D space. All points lie on a plane. The plane is given by its normal and a point lying on it. Is there a Matlab function or any Matlabby way to find the area directly from the matrix?
What i was trying to do is write a function that first computes the centroid,c, of the n-gon. Then form triangles : (1,2,c),(2,3,c),...,(n,1,c). Compute their area and sum up. But then i had to organise the polygon points in a cyclic order as they were unordered which i figured was hard. Is there a easy way to do so?
Is there a easier way in Matlab to just call some function on the matrix?
Here is perhaps an easier method.
First suppose that your plane is not parallel to the z-axis.
Then project the polygon down to the xy-plane simply by removing the 3rd coordinate.
Now compute the area A' in the xy-plane by the usual techniques.
If your plane makes an angle θ with the xy-plane, then your 3D
area A = A' / cos θ.
If your plane is parallel to the z-axis, do the same computation
w.r.t. the y-axis instead, projecting to the xz-plane.
To project from 3D to the plane normal to N, take some non-parallel vector A and compute the cross products U = N x A and V = N x U. After normalizing U and V, the dot products P.U and P.V give you 2D coordinates in the plane.
Joseph's solution is even easier (I'd recommend to drop the coordinate with the smallest absolute cosine).
You said the points all lie on a plane and you have the normal. You should then be able to reproject the 3-D points into 2-D coordinates in a new 2-D basis. I am not aware of a canned function in Matlab to do this , but coding it should not be difficult, this answer from Math.SE and this Matlab Central post should help you.
If you already solved the problem of finding the coordinates of the points in the 2-D plane they are in, you could use the Matlab boundary or convex hull function to compute the area of the boundary or convex hull enclosing the points.
[k,v]= boundary(x,y)
or
[k,v] =convhull(x,y)
where k is the vector of indices into points x,y, that define the boundary or convex hull, v is the area enclosed, and x, y are vectors of the x and y coordinates of your points.
What you were describing with trying to find triangles with the points sounds like a first attempt toward Delaunay triangulation. I think more recent versions of Matlab have functions to do Delaunay triangulation as well.

How to draw a sphere in matlab and patch it in a 3D plot?

I have a 3D plot and I want to put a sphere in a designed position. How can I create a sphere? I expected to use patch? Can anyone help me to do this please?
You can follow this:
Consider the center is at [c1,c2,c3]. The number of faces as r.
[x,y,z] = sphere(r);
surf(x+c1, y+c2, z+c3)
These two lines of code are enough to plot a sphere using the surf command.
For instance, if C=[2,2,2] and r=30 the result is as follows:
This is a sphere of radius 1 centered at [2,2,2]. To have a sphere with an arbitrary radius R, you should multiply the [x,y,z] values by R before adding the center.

Plotting a surface from a set of interior 3D scatter points in MATLAB

I have a large (~60,000) set of triplet data points representing x,y, and z coordinates, which are scattered throughout a Cartesian volume.
I'm looking for a way to use Matlab to visualize the non-convex shape/volume described by the maximum extent of the points.
I can of course visualize the individual points using scatter3, but given the large number of points the details of the shape are obscured by the noise of the dots.
As an analogy, imagine that you filled a hour glass with spheres of random sizes such as BBs, ping pong balls, and kix and then were given the coordinates of the center of each of each object. How would you take those coordinates and visualize the shape of the hour glass containing them?
My example uses different sized objects because the spacing between data points is non-uniform and effectively random; it uses an hourglass because the shape is non-convex.
If your surface enclosing the points can be described as a convex polyhedron (i.e. like the surface of a cube or a dodecahedron, without concave pits or jagged pointy parts), then I would start by creating a 3-D Delaunay triangulation of the points. This will fill the volume around the points with a series of tetrahedral elements with the points as their vertices, and you can then find the set of triangular faces that form the outer shell of the volume using the convexHull method of the DelaunayTri class.
Here's an example that generates 200 random points uniformly distributed within the unit cube, creates a tetrahedral mesh for these points, then finds the 3-D convex hull for the volume:
interiorPoints = rand(200,3); %# Generate 200 3-D points
DT = DelaunayTri(interiorPoints); %# Create the tetrahedral mesh
hullFacets = convexHull(DT); %# Find the facets of the convex hull
%# Plot the scattered points:
subplot(2,2,1);
scatter3(interiorPoints(:,1),interiorPoints(:,2),interiorPoints(:,3),'.');
axis equal;
title('Interior points');
%# Plot the tetrahedral mesh:
subplot(2,2,2);
tetramesh(DT);
axis equal;
title('Tetrahedral mesh');
%# Plot the 3-D convex hull:
subplot(2,2,3);
trisurf(hullFacets,DT.X(:,1),DT.X(:,2),DT.X(:,3),'FaceColor','c')
axis equal;
title('Convex hull');
You could treat your data as a sample from a three-dimensional probability density, and estimate that density on a grid, e.g. via a 3d histogram, or better a 3d kernel density estimator. Then apply a threshold and extract the surface using isosurface.
Unfortunately, hist3 included in the Statistics Toolbox is (despite its name) just a 2d histogram, and ksdensity works only with 1d data, so you would have to implement 3d versions yourself.