The Discrete Modelling Group (DGM)

at Darmstadt University of Technology (TUD) has been recently established inside the Department of Computer Science. Research focuses on several aspects of digital shapes:

• Establishing concepts and methods for linking discrete and continuous shape representations
• Creating adaptive (or scalable) discrete shape representations for efficient handling of complex shapes
• Developing tools for processing discrete representations or converting them to continuous surfaces

Research has been done in several projects funded by the German Ministries of Science and Business and has been documented at international conferences (e.g. SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualisation, Eurographics, Shape Modelling International) and in journals (ACM Transactions on Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Visualisation and Computer Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, The Visual Computer, and others).

Besides the general tasks of harmonisation, integration, and spreading of excellence, TUD is mainly involved with the acquisition and processing of digital shapes. With a strong experience from specifying geometric animation within MPEG4, TUD will help in defining new standards and protocols for the exchange of smart shapes. For the acquisition of shapes, models will be developed that describe how many samples one has to acquire to make sure certain geometric features are preserved in the digital model. These shapes will be represented later in a multi-scale fashion, so that the shape is accessible at different levels of accuracy and complexity.