CGAL users discussion list

["Laurent Rineau (CGAL/GeometryFactory)" <>]

The CGAL Open Source Project is pleased to announce the release 4.7 Beta 1
of CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

CGAL version 4.7 Beta 1 is a public testing release. It should provide
a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before the
release of the final version of CGAL 4.7 in September.


Besides fixes to existing packages, the following has changed since
CGAL 4.6:

  o Installation

    - The minimum required version of CMake is now 2.8.11. CMake versions 3.1,
      3.2, and 3.3 are supported.

    - All Qt4 demos have been updated and now require Qt5 to be
      compiled. Qt5 version 5.3 or higher is required. The support for Qt4
      is dropped. The code of the 3D demos now use modern OpenGL, with
      shaders, instead of the fixed pipeline API of OpenGL-1.


  o Advancing Front Surface Reconstruction (new package)

    This package provides a greedy algorithm for surface reconstruction
    from an unorganized point set. Starting from a seed facet, a piecewise
    linear surface is grown by adding Delaunay triangles one by one. The
    most plausible triangles are added first, in a way that avoids the
    appearance of topological singularities.


  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Shortest Paths (new package)

    The package provides methods for computing shortest path on
    triangulated surface meshes. Given a set of source points on the
    surface, this package provides a data structure that can efficiently
    provides the shortest path from any point on the surface to the sources
    points. There is no restriction on the genus or the number of
    connnected components of the mesh.


  o Triangulated Surface Mesh Skeletonization (new package)

    This package provides a (1D) curve skeleton extraction algorithm for a
    triangulated polygonal mesh without borders based on the mean curvature
    flow. The particularity of this skeleton is that it captures the
    topology of the input. For each skeleton vertex one can obtain its
    location and its corresponding vertices from the input mesh. The code
    is generic and works with any model of the `FaceListGraph` concept.


  o Polygon Mesh Processing (new package)

    This package implements a collection of methods and classes for polygon
    mesh processing, ranging from basic operations on simplices, to complex
    geometry processing algorithms. The implementation of this package
    mainly follows algorithms and references given in Botsch et al.'s book
    on polygon mesh processing.


  o 3D Point-Set Shape Detection (new package)

    This package implements the efficient RANSAC method for shape
    detection, contributed by Schnabel et al. From an unstructured point
    set with unoriented normals, the algorithm detects a set of
    shapes. Five types of primitive shapes are provided by this package:
    plane, sphere, cylinder, cone and torus. Detecting other types of
    shapes is possible by implementing a class derived from a base shape.


  o L Infinity Segment Delaunay Graphs (new package)

    The package provides the geometric traits for constructing the segment
    Delaunay graph in the max-norm (L Infinity). The traits also contain
    methods to draw the edges of the dual of the segment Delaunay graph in
    the max-norm i.e., the segment Voronoi diagram in the max-norm. The
    algorithm and traits rely on the segment Delaunay graph algorithm and
    traits under the Euclidean distance. The segment Voronoi diagram in the
    max-norm has applications in VLSI CAD.


  o 2D Visibility (new package)

    This package provides several variants to compute the visibility area
    of a point within polygonal regions in two dimensions.




See http://www.cgal.org/releases.html for a complete list of changes.


The CGAL project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust,
easy-to-use, and efficient C++ software library of geometric data
structures and algorithms, like
- triangulations (2D constrained triangulations, Delaunay triangulations
  and periodic triangulations in 2D and 3D),
- Voronoi diagrams (for 2D and 3D points, 2D additively weighted
  Voronoi diagrams, and segment Voronoi diagrams),
- Boolean operations on polygons and polyhedra,
- regularized Boolean operations on polygons with curved arcs
- arrangements of curves,
- mesh generation (2D, 3D and surface mesh generation,
  surface mesh subdivision and parametrization),
- alpha shapes (in 2D and 3D),
- convex hull algorithms (in 2D, 3D and dD),
- operations on polygons (straight skeleton and offset polygon),
- search structures (kd trees for nearest neighbor search, and
  range and segment trees),
- interpolation (natural neighbor interpolation and placement of
  streamlines),
- optimization algorithms (smallest enclosing sphere of points or
  spheres, smallest enclosing ellipsoid of points, principal
  component analysis),
- kinetic data structures




Some modules are distributed under the terms of the LGPL Open Source
license (GNU Lesser General Public License v3 or later versions).
Most modules are distributed under the terms of the GPL Open Source
license (GNU General Public License v3 or later versions).
If your intended usage does not meet the criteria of the
aforementioned licenses, a commercial license can be purchased from
GeometryFactory (http://www.geometryfactory.com/).


For further information and for downloading the library and its
documentation, please visit the CGAL web site: http://www.cgal.org/


-- 
Laurent Rineau, PhD
R&D Engineer at GeometryFactory           http://www.geometryfactory.com/
Release Manager of the CGAL Project       http://www.cgal.org/