Spherical diffusion for 3D surface smoothing
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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

An Efficient and Flexible Cell Aggregation Method for 3D Spheroid Production
Published on: March 27, 2017
1University of California, Berkeley, USA. thomas.buelow@philips.com
Abstract:
A diffusion-based approach to surface smoothing is presented. Surfaces are represented as scalar functions defined on the sphere. The approach is equivalent to Gaussian smoothing on the sphere and is computationally efficient since it does not require iterative smoothing. Furthermore, it does not suffer from the well-known shrinkage problem. Evolution of important shape features (parabolic curves) under diffusion is demonstrated. A nonlinear modification of the diffusion process is introduced in order to improve smoothing behavior of elongated and poorly centered objects.
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