6. Conclusion and future work
In this paper, we have proposed a novel data-driven analysis theory on surfaces and have made our initial efforts to apply such theory to a few graphics applications towards more quantitative and accurate analysis. In particular, we have extended the popular Hilbert–Huang transform, a fully data-driven adaptive method, to handle signals defined over 3D surfaces. The technical core of our computational framework is to compute the Riesz transform on 3D surfaces by eigenvalue decomposition of Laplacian matrix, which utilizes the relationship between Riesz transform and fractional Laplacian operator. Furthermore, we integrate our Riesz transform with the numerical techniques of EMD on 3D surfaces by way of monogenic signals, in order to compute Hilbert spectra of any input signal defined over 3D surfaces. Hilbert spectra include the space-frequency-energy distribution of signals defined over 3D surfaces and can characterize key local feature information in a more quantitative and accurate manner. As a result, critical local information such as instantaneous frequency, local amplitude, and local phase, could aid many graphics applications, opening up a new way to process geometric and/or non-geometric information on surfaces. Within our novel data-driven computational framework enabled by HHT on surfaces, potential applications are abundant. Through comprehensive experiments, we are able to accommodate many modeling, analysis, processing functionalities, such as 3D surface spectral processing and prominent feature detection. Extensive comparisons on popularly-used geometric models have effectively demonstrated that our surface processing method based on novel Hilbert–Huang transform on 3D surfaces can produce excellent results. Continuing to broaden the HHT’s application scope to contribute to more application sub-fields would require much more research endeavors in the near future. We expect more research results on this subject to be documented in the near future by us and colleagues. Ultimately, many effective, robust analysis on a large variety of scientific datasets generated from numerous digital content paradigms would enhance the overall data processing capabilities.