Beltrami coefficient and angular distortion of discrete geometric mappings

Abstract

Over the past several decades, geometric mapping methods have been extensively developed and utilized for many practical problems in science and engineering. To assess the quality of geometric mappings, one common consideration is their conformality. In particular, it is well-known that conformal mappings preserve angles and hence the local geometry, which is beneficial in many applications. Therefore, many existing works have focused on the angular distortion as a measure of the conformality of mappings. More recently, quasi-conformal theory has attracted increasing attention in the development of geometric mapping methods, in which the Beltrami coefficient has also been considered as a representation of the conformal distortion. However, the precise connection between these two concepts has not been analyzed. In this work, we study the connection between the two concepts and establish a series of theoretical results. In particular, we discover a simple relationship between the norm of the Beltrami coefficient of a mapping and the absolute angular distortion of triangle elements under the mapping. We can further estimate the maximal angular distortion using a simple formula in terms of the Beltrami coefficient. We verify the developed theoretical results and estimates using numerical experiments on multiple geometric mapping methods, covering conformal mapping, quasi-conformal mapping, and area-preserving mapping algorithms, for a variety of surface meshes in biology and engineering. Altogether, by establishing the theoretical foundation for the relationship between the angular distortion and Beltrami coefficient, our work opens up new avenues for the quantification and analysis of surface mapping algorithms.