Customer Reviews

Level Set Methods and Dynamic Implicit Surfaces

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you're new to level set methods and are hoping to learn to implement them computationally, this is the WRONG book for you. This book reads like a 250 page review paper. Most of the material it covers is explained in much better detail in the references it provides.
I'm not sure what audience this book is intended for. The only use I can see for this book is to help theorists learn level set methods. It certainly is of no help to those interested in implementing them. This book contains no code or psuedocode examples which would be helpful to a novice, nor does it contain any cutting edge techniques which would be useful to experts.
I would give this a 1 star rating, but I must admit that it is clearly written. Also to its credit are the colored figures, which inspire one to want to use level set methods, even if this book is of no help in implementing them.

The book is merely a collection of (way too shortened) papers from the same authors and others. Most of the time there is no coherent link between the different parts. Worst, there are many examples but very little details for each of them, when I start reading a chapter, I always end up getting the related papers from the internet which are in most cases clearer and more complete, and also there are free.

I really respect the achievement made in cg, image processing, and computational physics made by the authors (so I will give it 2 stars), but once you are done looking at the fancy pictures, you won't get much from this book apart from its bibliographic references.

I would rather recommend the book "Level set methods and fast marching methods" from J.A. Sethian, the mathematical aspects are better covered and it manages to take things into perspective while still remaining very practical.

The book introduces the levelset method, starting from the very basics: the idea of implicit functions, discretization, schemes for numerically solving PDEs. It also covers advanced issues like reinitialization, particle methods, levelset for modelling objects of codimension two. Finally, an extensive section on applications from computer vision and computational physics gives the reader an idea of the power and elegance of levelset methods.
The presentation is very readable and precise enough to allow implementing the algorithms described straight away on the computer.
This is a book for beginners and experts, written by a well-known expert in the field (Osher and Seithan wrote one of the most influential papers on levelsets).

I read this book and Sethian's book and found this one to be much easier to read. The presentation follows a logical sequence and looks much less like someone's thesis than Sethian's text. Level sets and many of their various applications are covered in relative detail for a book of this size.

However, this is more of a survey book, as others have mentioned, and in my opinion that is a benefit. In addition to covering the fundamentals of level sets, the text covers many modern methods for solving hyperbolic conservations laws. I learned as much, or more, about high-order interpolation, flux-splitting, etc. from this book as from books by Laney and Leveque. For more detail on any of these topics, some of the best references are provided.

An excellent text at a good price.

This book is good. It covers level set methods from the very basics through some rather advanced material. Sure it takes some material from published papers (the subject matter is way to recent to be done any other way).

You can pick this book up with some knowledge of how to write a simple computer program and with in a few weeks be up to speed on numerical methods for solving interesting problems in image processing and other interface tracking problems.

It doesn't have all the numerical proofs you might want, but if you're willing to believe they exist then you can get off to a fast start with this text and with a little creativity you should be able to start submitting your own papers using the tools presented here.

I bought this book to better understand the level set methods Fedkiw et al use in their computer animation work in fluids. Their papers often gloss over what level set methods are and how to use them (likely due to page limits in conference proceedings). This book does a very good job of getting you up to speed.

The book introduces the levelset method, starting from the very basics: the idea of implicit functions, discretization, schemes for numerically solving PDEs. It also covers advanced issues like reinitialization, particle methods, levelset for modelling objects of codimension two. Finally, an extensive section on applications from computer vision and computational physics gives the reader an idea of the power and elegance of levelset methods.
The presentation is very readable and precise enough to allow implementing the algorithms described straight away on the computer.
This is a book for beginners and experts, written by a well-known expert in the field (Osher and Seithan wrote one of the most influential papers on levelsets).

This book provides a good introduction (and extensive references) to the level set method. The major implementation details are given (with the finite difference formulas). The book is intended for people who already know something about numerical PDE's and CFD (computational fluid dynamics). Not all of the details are given (such as smoothing of the level set when computing curvature), but this will probably be addressed in a future volume. Overall, this book will get you started with actual computations. But do not be afraid to consult the more recent literature on the subject.

This book is ABSOLUTELY among the best in the area of computational mathematics. It covers from the basics to the trendy applications, which is the biggest satisfaction I got from spending money on it. It is more than a collection of papers (no kidding!), since the contents have a good interior coherence if you read it carefully rather than browsing it like a novel. And for the those fancy pictures in the book, all I can say is that 'a picture is worth than thousands of words' - it is especially true in the area of graphics. You guys who care about SIGGRAPH should know better. More than that, this book does give you the numerical recipe for you to DIY these simulations on your own computer, besides the mathematics behind all those sexy results. Anyway, this book is worth every penny you spent!

Exciting material, cool pictures. I love this book!