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The Unified Surface Ricci Flow

Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far. This work introduces the unified theoretic framework for discrete Surface Ricci Flow, including all common schemes: Thurston's Circle Packing, Tangential Circle Packing, Inversive Distance Circle Packing and Discrete Yamabe. Furthermore, this work also introduces a novel scheme, virtual radius circle packing, under the unified framework. This work gives explicit geometric interpretation to the discrete Ricci energy for all the schemes, and Hessian of the discrete Ricci energy for schemes with Euclidean back ground geometry. The unified frame work deepen our understanding to the the discrete surface Ricci flow theory, and inspired us to discover the new schemes, improved the flexibility and robustness of the algorithms, greatly simplified the implementation and improved the debugging efficiency. Experimental results shows the unified surface Ricci flow algorithms can handle general surfaces with different topologies, and is robust to meshes with different qualities, and effective for solving real problems.