Brown Professor of Engineering and Computer Science Gabriel Taubin’s 1995 paper, “A Signal Processing Approach To Fair Surface Design” has been re-published as part of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 2. ACM published the book as a celebration of 50 years of SIGGRAPH, the premier annual conference and exhibition from its special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques.
The association reports one of its celebratory projects would be publishing a second volume of seminal graphics papers. The first volume was published in 1998 as part of the 25th SIGGRAPH conference. Seminal Graphics Papers: Pushing the Boundaries, Volume 2 celebrates ACM SIGGRAPH's origins and continued success as a technical and professional society, exemplifying the ground-breaking research that has been the conference's hallmark since 1974.
Taubin’s paper was included in the book as the second paper in the geometry section (https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3596711#sec4). The paper itself has been cited more than two thousand times.
Taubin said that the paper introduced a simple and minor change to the Laplacian Smoothing algorithm which solved the longstanding shrinkage problem. The modified algorithm alternates between a positive and a negative parameter through the iterations, resulting in a simple, practical and efficient algorithm to remove noise from large polygon meshes used in computer graphics. In addition, the paper introduced a mathematical framework to analyze the behavior of the proposed and related algorithms, which extends classical digital signal processing concepts, such as filter design, to the geometry domain.