Measurement for intersection of 2 irregular shaped 3d object

Question

I am trying to implement an objective function that minimize the overlap of 2 irregular shaped 3d objects. While the most accurate measurement of the overlap is the intersection volume, it's too computationally expensive as I am dealing with complex objects with 1000+ faces and are not convex.

I am wondering if there are other measurements of intersection between 3d objects that are much faster to compute? 2 requirements for the measurement are: 1. When the measurement is 0, there should be no overlap; 2. The measurement should be a scalar(not a boolean value) indicating the degree of overlapping, but this value doesn't need to be very accurate.

Possible measurements I am considering include some sort of 2D surface area of intersection, or 1D penetration depth. Alternatively I can estimate volume with a sample based method that sample points inside one object and test the percentage of points that exist in another object. But I don't know how computational expensive it is to sample points inside a complex 3d shape as well as to test if a point is enclosed by such a shape.

I will really appreciate any advices, codes, or equations on this matter. Also if you can suggest any libraries (preferably python library) that accept .obj, .ply...etc files and perform 3D geometry computation that will be great! I will also post here if I find out a good method.

Update: I found a good python library called Trimesh that performs all the computations mentioned by me and others in this post. It computes the exact intersection volume with the Blender backend; it can voxelize meshes and compute the volume of the co-occupied voxels; it can also perform surface and volumetric points sampling within one mesh and test points containment within another mesh. I found surface point sampling and containment testing(sort of surface intersection) and the grid approach to be the fastest.

Answer 1

By straight voxelization:

If the faces are of similar size (if needed triangulate the large ones), you can use a gridding approach: define a regular 3D grid with a spacing size larger than the longest edge and store one bit per voxel.

Then for every vertex of the mesh, set the bit of the cell it is included in (this just takes a truncation of the coordinates). By doing this, you will obtain the boundary of the object as a connected surface. You will obtain an estimate of the volume by means of a 3D flood filling algorithm, either from an inside or an outside pixel. (Outside will be easier but be sure to leave a one voxel margin around the object.)

Estimating the volumes of both objects as well as intersection or union is straightforward with this machinery. The cost will depend on the number of faces and the number of voxels.

Answer 2

A sample-based approach is what I'd try first. Generate a bunch of points in the unioned bounding AABB, and divide the number of points in A and B by the number of points in A or B. (You can adapt this measure to your use case -- it doesn't work very well when A and B have very different volumes.) To check whether a given point is in a given volume, use a crossing number test, which Google. There are acceleration structures that can help with this test, but my guess is that the number of samples that'll give you reasonable accuracy is lower than the number of samples necessary to benefit overall from building the acceleration structure.

As a variant of this, you can check line intersection instead of point intersection: Generate a random (axis-aligned, for efficiency) line, and measure how much of it is contained in A, in B, and in both A and B. This requires more bookkeeping than point-in-polyhedron, but will give you better per-sample information and thus reduce the number of times you end up iterating through all the faces.