In recent years several depth cameras have emerged on the consumer market, creating many interesting possibilities forboth professional and recreational usage. One example of such a camera is the Microsoft Kinect sensor originally usedwith the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. In this master thesis a system is presented that utilizes this device in order to create an as accurate as possible 3D reconstruction of an indoor environment. The major novelty of the presented system is the data structure based on signed distance fields and voxel octrees used to represent the observed environment. / Under de senaste åren har flera olika avståndskameror lanserats på konsumentmarkanden. Detta har skapat många intressanta applikationer både i professionella system samt för underhållningssyfte. Ett exempel på en sådan kamera är Microsoft Kinect som utvecklades för Microsofts spelkonsol Xbox 360. I detta examensarbete presenteras ett system som använder Kinect för att skapa en så exakt rekonstruktion i 3D av en innomhusmiljö som möjligt. Den främsta innovationen i systemet är en datastruktur baserad på signed distance fields (SDF) och octrees, vilket används för att representera den rekonstruerade miljön.

Previamente à cada estimativa ou simulação geoestatística os domínios geológicos do depósito devem ser modelados, o que tradicionalmente é feito de forma manual por um geomodelador, em um processo laborioso, demorado e subjetivo. Por essa razão novas técnicas conhecidas como métodos implícitos veem surgindo. Essas técnicas fornecem algoritmos que substituem o processo de digitalização manual dos métodos explícitos por alguma forma de procedimento automático. Essa dissertação visita alguns métodos implícitos bem estabelecidos com atenção especial à modelagem geológica implícita com funções distância assinalada. Um estudo de caso em um banco de dados real é apresentado e a aplicabilidade do método discutida. Embora não substitua por completo um geomodelador experiente, o método provou ser capaz de gerar modelos geológicos semi-automáticos realistas a partir dos dados amostrais, e se mostra útil principalmente nas fases iniciais da pesquisa mineral. / Prior to every geostatistical estimation or simulation study there is a need for delimiting the geologic domains of the deposit, which is traditionally done manually by a geomodeler in a laborious, time consuming and subjective process. For this reason, novel techniques referred to as implicit modelling have appeared. These techniques provide algorithms that replace the manual digitization process of the traditional methods by some form of automatic procedure. This dissertation covers a few well established implicit methods currently available with special attention to the signed distance function methodology. A case study based on a real dataset was performed and its applicability discussed. Although it did not replace an experienced geomodeler, the method proved to be capable in creating semi-automatic geological models from the sampling data, especially in the early stages of exploration.

Previamente à cada estimativa ou simulação geoestatística os domínios geológicos do depósito devem ser modelados, o que tradicionalmente é feito de forma manual por um geomodelador, em um processo laborioso, demorado e subjetivo. Por essa razão novas técnicas conhecidas como métodos implícitos veem surgindo. Essas técnicas fornecem algoritmos que substituem o processo de digitalização manual dos métodos explícitos por alguma forma de procedimento automático. Essa dissertação visita alguns métodos implícitos bem estabelecidos com atenção especial à modelagem geológica implícita com funções distância assinalada. Um estudo de caso em um banco de dados real é apresentado e a aplicabilidade do método discutida. Embora não substitua por completo um geomodelador experiente, o método provou ser capaz de gerar modelos geológicos semi-automáticos realistas a partir dos dados amostrais, e se mostra útil principalmente nas fases iniciais da pesquisa mineral. / Prior to every geostatistical estimation or simulation study there is a need for delimiting the geologic domains of the deposit, which is traditionally done manually by a geomodeler in a laborious, time consuming and subjective process. For this reason, novel techniques referred to as implicit modelling have appeared. These techniques provide algorithms that replace the manual digitization process of the traditional methods by some form of automatic procedure. This dissertation covers a few well established implicit methods currently available with special attention to the signed distance function methodology. A case study based on a real dataset was performed and its applicability discussed. Although it did not replace an experienced geomodeler, the method proved to be capable in creating semi-automatic geological models from the sampling data, especially in the early stages of exploration.

Previamente à cada estimativa ou simulação geoestatística os domínios geológicos do depósito devem ser modelados, o que tradicionalmente é feito de forma manual por um geomodelador, em um processo laborioso, demorado e subjetivo. Por essa razão novas técnicas conhecidas como métodos implícitos veem surgindo. Essas técnicas fornecem algoritmos que substituem o processo de digitalização manual dos métodos explícitos por alguma forma de procedimento automático. Essa dissertação visita alguns métodos implícitos bem estabelecidos com atenção especial à modelagem geológica implícita com funções distância assinalada. Um estudo de caso em um banco de dados real é apresentado e a aplicabilidade do método discutida. Embora não substitua por completo um geomodelador experiente, o método provou ser capaz de gerar modelos geológicos semi-automáticos realistas a partir dos dados amostrais, e se mostra útil principalmente nas fases iniciais da pesquisa mineral. / Prior to every geostatistical estimation or simulation study there is a need for delimiting the geologic domains of the deposit, which is traditionally done manually by a geomodeler in a laborious, time consuming and subjective process. For this reason, novel techniques referred to as implicit modelling have appeared. These techniques provide algorithms that replace the manual digitization process of the traditional methods by some form of automatic procedure. This dissertation covers a few well established implicit methods currently available with special attention to the signed distance function methodology. A case study based on a real dataset was performed and its applicability discussed. Although it did not replace an experienced geomodeler, the method proved to be capable in creating semi-automatic geological models from the sampling data, especially in the early stages of exploration.

The ability to automatically estimate the volume of timber is becoming increasingly important within the timber industry. The large number of timber trucks arriving each day at Swedish timber terminals fortifies the need for a volume estimation performed in real-time and on-the-go as the trucks arrive. This thesis investigates if a volumetric integration of disparity maps acquired from a Multi-View Stereo (MVS) system is a suitable approach for automatic volume estimation of timber loads. As real-time execution is preferred, efforts were made to provide a scalable method. The proposed method was quantitatively evaluated on datasets containing two geometric objects of known volume. A qualitative comparison to manual volume estimates of timber loads was also made on datasets recorded at a Swedish timber terminal. The proposed method is shown to be both accurate and precise under specific circumstances. However, robustness is poor to varying weather conditions, although a more thorough evaluation of this aspect needs to be performed. The method is also parallelizable, which means that future efforts can be made to significantly decrease execution time.

Simultaneous localization and mapping is the technique to construct a 3D map of unknown environment. With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in scanning large planar regions such as wall surfaces in a room. The lack of depth variations on planar surfaces makes the global alignment an ill-conditioned problem. In this thesis, we present a novel approach for registering 3D point clouds by combining both color and depth information. Instead of directly searching for point correspondences among 3D data, the proposed method first extracts features from the RGB images, and then back-projects the features to the 3D space to identify more reliable correspondences. These color correspondences form the initial input to the ICP procedure which then proceeds to refine the alignment. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can achieve better accuracy than existing SLAMs in reconstructing indoor environments with large planar surfaces.

The main contribution of this thesis is the implementation of manufacturing constraints in shape and topology optimization. Fabrication limitations related to the casting process are formulated as mathematical constraints and introduced in the optimization algorithm. In addition, based on the same theoretical and modelization tools, we propose a novel formulation for multi-phase optimization problems, which can be extended to the optimization of structures with functionally-graded properties. A key ingredient for the mathematical formulation of most problems throughout our work is the notion of the signed distance function to a domain. This work is divided into three parts. The rst part is bibliographical and contains the necessary background material for the understanding of the thesis' main core. It includes the rst two chapters. Chapter 1 provides a synopsis of shape and topology optimization methods and emphasizes the combination of shape sensitivity analysis and the level-set method for tracking a shape's boundary. In Chapter 2 we give a short description of the casting process, from which all our manufacturing constraints derive. We explain how industrial designers account for these limitations and propose a strategy to incorporate them in shape and topology optimization algorithms. The second part is about the mathematical formulation of manufacturing constraints. It starts with Chapter 3, where the control of thickness is discussed. Based on the signed distance function, we formulate three constraints to ensure a maximum and minimm feature size, as well as a minimal distance between structural members. Then, in Chapter 4, we propose ways to handle molding direction constraints and combine them with thickness constraints. Finally, a thermal constraint coming from the solidi cation of cast parts is treated in Chapter 5 using several thermal models. Multi-phase optimization is discussed in the third part. The general problem of shape and topology optimization using multiple phases is presented in detail in Chapter 6. A "smoothed-interface" approach, based again on the signed distance function, is proposed to avoid numerical di culties related to classical "sharp-interface" problems and a shape derivative is calculated. An extension of this novel formulation to general types of material properties' gradation is shown in the Appendix A.