A NUMERICAL ALGORITHM FOR L2 SEMI-DISCRETE OPTIMAL TRANSPORT IN 3D

This paper introduces a numerical algorithm to compute the L-2 optimal transport map between two measures mu and nu, where mu derives from a density rho defined as a piecewise linear function (supported by a tetrahedral mesh), and where nu is a sum of Dirac masses. I first give an elementary presentation of some known results on optimal transport and then observe a relation with another problem (optimal sampling). This relation gives simple arguments to study the objective functions that characterize both problems. I then propose a practical algorithm to compute the optimal transport map between a piecewise linear density and a sum of Dirac masses in 3D. In this semi-discrete setting [Aurenhammer et al., Proc. of 8th Symposium on Computational Geometry (1992) 350-357] showed that the optimal transport map is determined by the weights of a power diagram. The optimal weights are computed by minimizing a convex objective function with a quasi-Newton method. To evaluate the value and gradient of this objective function, I propose an efficient and robust algorithm, that computes at each iteration the intersection between a power diagram and the tetrahedral mesh that defines the measure mu. The numerical algorithm is experimented and evaluated on several datasets, with up to hundred thousands tetrahedra and one million Dirac masses.