Q-zip: Singularity Editing Primitive for Quad Meshes

Singularity editing of a quadrangle mesh consists in shifting singularities around for either improving the quality of the mesh elements or canceling extraneous singularities, so as to increase mesh regularity. However, the particular structure of a quad mesh renders the exploration of allowable connectivity changes non-local and hard to automate. In this paper, we introduce a simple, principled, and general quad-mesh editing primitive with which pairs of arbitrarily distant singularities can be efficiently displaced around a mesh through a deterministic and reversible chain of local topological operations with a minimal footprint. Dubbed Q-zip as it acts as a zipper opening up and collapsing down quad strips, our practical mesh operator for singularity editing can be easily implemented via parallel transport of a reference compass between any two irregular vertices. Batches of Q-zips performed in parallel can then be used for efficient singularity editing.