Kevin Manogue | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Generalizing Shape-from-Template to Topological Changes

Reconstructing the surfaces of deformable objects from correspondences between a 3D template and a 2D image is well studied under Shape-from-Template (SfT) methods; however, existing approaches break down when topological changes accompany the deformation. We propose a principled extension of SfT that enables reconstruction in the presence of such changes. Our approach is initialized with a classical SfT solution and iteratively adapts the template by partitioning its spatial domain so as to minimize an energy functional that jointly encodes physical plausibility and reprojection consistency. We demonstrate that the method robustly captures a wide range of practically relevant topological events including tears and cuts on bounded 2D surfaces, thereby establishing the first general framework for topological-change-aware SfT. Experiments on both synthetic and real data confirm that our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Extracting Dark-Matter Velocities from Halo Masses: A Reconstruction Conjecture

Increasing attention has recently focused on non-traditional dark-matter production mechanisms which result in primordial dark-matter velocity distributions with highly non-thermal shapes. In this paper, we undertake an assessment of how the detailed shape of a general dark-matter velocity distribution impacts structure formation in the non-linear regime. In particular, we investigate the impact on the halo-mass and subhalo-mass functions, as well as on astrophysical observables such as satellite and cluster-number counts. We find that many of the standard expectations no longer hold in situations in which this velocity distribution takes a highly non-trivial, even multi-modal shape. For example, we find that the nominal free-streaming scale alone becomes insufficient to characterize the effect of free-streaming on structure formation. In addition, we propose a simple one-line conjecture which can be used to "reconstruct" the primordial dark-matter velocity distribution directly from the shape of the halo-mass function. Although our conjecture is completely heuristic, we show that it successfully reproduces the salient features of the underlying dark-matter velocity distribution even for non-trivial distributions which are highly non-thermal and/or multi-modal, such as might occur for non-minimal dark sectors. Moreover, since our approach relies only on the halo-mass function, our conjecture provides a method of probing dark-matter properties even for scenarios in which the dark and visible sectors interact only gravitationally.

astro-ph.CO↗