Engineering with Computers

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-023-01908-6

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Bc‑hexmatching: an improved hexahedral mesh matching approach

based on base‑complex structure
Qingfeng Zhao1 · Gang Xu1,2 · Zhoufang Xiao1 · Haiyan Wu1 · Renshu Gu1 · Yang Liu3 · Yufei Pang3

Received: 18 April 2023 / Accepted: 18 September 2023

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2023

Abstract
Automatic generation of hexahedral meshes for complex geometries is still a challenging problem, the domain-decomposition
based method is one of the promising methods for such problems. When generating the meshes of sub-components of a
domain, it is often necessary to impose consistent mesh constraints on the interfaces between sub-components. The adop-
tion of mesh matching algorithms can relax such constraints, and improve the efficiency and robustness of mesh generation
framework. In this paper, a new mesh matching algorithm based on base-complex structure is proposed. In our method,
the base-complex structures of the sub-components to be matched are obtained and optimized first, and then they are used
to match the interfaces between the sub-components via dual chord operations on the base-complex structures. After the
matching process, an optimization problem is formulated and solved to adjust the positions of corresponding vertices on
the interfaces. Compared to the current mesh matching algorithms, instead of performing dual operations directly on mesh
elements, the proposed method needs less dual operations and is able to obtain higher quality elements near the interfaces.
Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified by several matching examples.

Keywords Mesh matching · Base-complex structure · Dual operation · Simplification

1 Introduction problems [2]. Various hexahedral mesh generation methods

In numerical simulation methods, i.e., finite element method,
finite volume method and so on, the input computational
domain has to be discretised into a mesh representation. For
3D problems, the tetrahedral mesh is widely used since the
automatic generation technology [1] of tetrahedral mesh is
relatively mature, and it can be applied to complex geom-
etries. Compared to the tetrahedral mesh, the hexahedral
mesh has higher computational accuracy and lower storage
costs and it is therefore preferred in numerical simulation
* Gang Xu
gxu@hdu.edu.cn
* Yufei Pang
pangyufei@cardc.cn
1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou
Dianzi University, Hangzhou, China
2
Key Laboratory of Discrete Industrial Internet of Things
of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou, China
3
Institute of Computational Aerodynamics, China
Aerodynamics Researching and Development Center,
Mianyang, China
have been developed. Most of them directly generate the
hexahedral mesh for the entire model. The polycube-based
methods [3–6] can generate high-quality hexahedral mesh.
Still, such methods cannot produce high-quality results for
complex models since it is difficult to construct the polycube
structure for complex models. The octree-based method
[7–13] can generate the hexahedral mesh for the complex
model. However, the quality and topology of the generated
mesh cannot meet the simulation requirements. All in all, the
automatic generation of hexahedral meshes with high quality
for arbitrary complex models is still a challenging problem.
Instead of generating the hexahedral mesh for the whole
computational domain directly, an alternative way is to
decompose the complex model into several components with
simple shape. These components can be meshed automati-
cally, and then the hexahedral meshes of these components
are merged together [14, 15]. However, in many cases, the
interfaces of the hexahedral meshes of these different com-
ponents are usually non-conforming. For simple decomposi-
tion interfaces, it is possible to solve an integer programming
problem to ensure conforming mesh elements on the inter-
faces when generating the hexahedral meshes of the different

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Vol.:(0123456789)

components. Nevertheless, such an integer programming
problem may not have a solution for complex interfaces
due to complex constraints. To solve the non-conforming
problem for such cases, it is better to relax the constraints
to generate the hexahedral meshes of components after and
perform a mesh matching process to make the elements on
the sharing interface being conformal afterwards. The adop-
tion of the mesh matching process can not only reuse exist-
ing meshes, but also extend the ability of the hexahedral
mesh algorithm for complex geometries.
Several mesh matching methods have been proposed dur-
ing the last two decades. Jankovich et al. proposed a graft-
ing tool [16] to project the boundary outline of an interface
to another interface. However, this method only focuses on
the projection of the boundary outline but does not discuss
the consistency of the internal mesh of the outline. Staten
et al. first proposed an automatic hexahedral mesh matching
algorithm [17] by conducting dual operators to change the
dual chord structures of the interfaces. However, the pro-
posed dual operation can not handle the localization of self-
intersection sheets, which will cause robustness issues. Chen
et al. [18] further improved the algorithm by introducing a
more precise criterion for chords matching and a new con-
cept of partition chord set. These improvements enable the
algorithm to handle more complex interfaces, such as inter-
faces with internal loops. They also proposed a dual opera-
tor to handle self-intersection sheet extraction and inflation
locally. However, their dual operator still cannot handle
sheets intersecting itself more than once. Recently, Chen
et al. [19] proposed a hex-mesh matching approach to handle
complex sheet inflation under constraints. The approaches
proposed by Staten et al. and Chen et al. directly perform
topology operation on the quadrilateral mesh elements on
the interfaces, however, these methods do not consider the
topology structure on these interfaces. This leads to many
unnecessary dual operations, such that the robustness, effi-
ciency and quality of the corresponding matching methods
still have some improvement space. Although the proposed
chords matching criterion is more accurate, it removes the
spatial distance threshold and can not ensure that the cor-
responding vertices have the same location, which causes
inverted hex elements in the resulting merged mesh.
In this paper, a new hexahedral mesh matching algorithm
is proposed. The new algorithm is based on base-complex
structure and considers the topology of the matching inter-
faces. Firstly, a simplification step is conducted to optimize
the topology of the interfaces and reduce the number of
base-complex chords. This step will make the two interfaces
easier to be matched. Secondly, a new subdivision strategy is
proposed to improve the simplification rate while maintain-
ing the interface’s boundary features and mesh quality. In
the proposed matching step, the base-complex structures of
the interfaces are matched first, then the number of segments
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within the base-complex components are considered to
match. Compared to the methods with direct mesh ele-
ment operation, the proposed method is able to avoid many
unnecessary dual operations and thus gains high efficiency.
Finally, after the matching process, an optimization problem
is formulated to adjust the positions of corresponding ver-
tices on the interfaces. The optimization process can avoid
the generation of inverted elements and ensure the resulting
mesh quality.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2
briefly introduces some basic concepts and gives an over-
view of this algorithm. Sections 3, 4, and 5 present the
details of the algorithm at each main step. Section 6 presents
examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
method. And a conclusion is given in Sect. 7.
2 Basic concepts and overview
of the algorithm
In this section, we will first briefly introduce some concepts
that frequently appear in this study, including the base-com-
plex structure and its dual structure, dual operations that are
just like hexahedral mesh. After that, we will give an over-
view of the proposed algorithm, which will be explained in
detail in the following sections.
2.1 Basic concepts
The mesh matching algorithm continuously performs dual
operations on the two non-conforming interfaces of two
hexahedral meshes. Unlike traditional hexahedral mesh
matching algorithms, the dual operations in this study are
conducted on the base-complex structure of a hexahedral
mesh. We will introduce the key concepts that we use in
this study, such as the base complex and the dual structures
based on it, but leave out some more basic concepts such as
interface, dual sheet, dual chords, dual columns and dual
operation like pillowing, sheet extraction, sheet inflation
(they can be found in previous works [17, 19–23]). In this
study, as a distinction, the concepts like dual operation, dual
sheet, etc., relate to a hexahedral mesh, while the concepts
like base-complex sheet, base-complex chord, etc., relate to
a base-complex structure.
Base-complex
The valence of vertex, edge, and face is expressed in
terms of the number of their adjacent hex elements. An
mesh edge is defined as an irregular edge if its valence is
not two on the boundary or four in the interior. A singularity
is composed of a series of connected irregular edges with
the same valence, and its valence is defined as the valence
of the irregular edge it has.
Engineering with Computers
From an n-valence singularity, n separated surfaces can
be extended, and they terminate at another singularity or
the surface boundary. A hexahedral mesh can be divided
into a number of cube-like components by all the surfaces
extended from its singularities, and each component con-
tains at least one hex element. Such components and the
corresponding vertices, edges and faces represent the base-
complex structure [24] of a hexahedral mesh as shown in
Fig. 1. The base-complex structure can be considered as a
coarsened hexahedral mesh, which has the same topological
properties as a hexahedral mesh.
Dual structures on base-complex structure As men-
tioned earlier, a base-complex structure has the same
topological properties as a hexahedral mesh. Thus, a base-
complex structure also has dual structures like the sheet, col-
umn, and so on [25]. Starting from a base-complex edge and
iteratively finding its topologically parallel edges, we can
eventually find a set of base-complex components, just like
a dual sheet of a hexahedral mesh; we call this set the base-
complex sheet. Similarly, starting from a base-complex face
and iteratively finding its topologically parallel faces, we can
define a base-complex column. Note that the base-complex
chord defined in [25] is the same as the base-complex col-
umn defined in [17, 18], and the base-complex chord defined
in [17, 18] is the set of quadrilaterals of a base-complex
sheet on an interface. This paper uses the same definition
for base-complex column and chord as in [17, 18]. Figure 2
shows different dual structures of a base-complex structure.
Chord matching criteria
We use the criteria proposed in [18] for the chord match-
ing. To make this paper self-contained, we will briefly intro-
duce the criteria here (please refer to [18] for more details).
Give two sets of base-complex chords CA and CB , which
are on interfaces QA and QB , respectively. M is the set of
matched base-complex chord pairs. For the two given
Fig. 1  a Hexahedral mesh. b Base-complex structure. c Different components are denoted as different colors
base-complex chords CAi and CBi , they are considered to
match each other if they satisfy the following conditions:
1. The intersections of CAi and CBi with other chords should
be the same. To be specific, if CA , CA , etc., in M inter-
j1 j2
sect with CAi , then the matched base-complex chords CB ,
j1
CB , etc., corresponding to CA , CA , etc. should also inter-
j2 j1 j2
sect with CBi .
2. The intersections order should be the same. That is, if CAi
intersects with CA , CA , etc., in this order, then CBi should
j1 j2
also intersect with CB , CB , etc., in corresponding order.
j1 j2
2.2 Overview of the algorithm
The algorithm takes two hexahedral meshes (denoted as HA
and HB ), and two depth parameters that represent the maxi-
mum range of each mesh that dual operations can modify as
inputs. Besides, the user should also specify the interfaces
of the two meshes that need to be matched. Then, the algo-
rithm extracts a local part of each mesh according to the
depth parameter.
The local part is denoted as HA and HB (Fig. 3), respec-
′ ′
tively. Then, the base-complexes of these two parts can
be obtained, denoted as BA and BB . Let CA and CB be the
base-complex chords set on the two interfaces going to
be matched. As shown in Fig. 4, the proposed algorithm
includes the following three main steps:
1. Interface simplification (Sect. 3). The base-complex
structure of two interfaces may be quite complex, espe-
cially when there are many base-complex chords in CA
and CB . Therefore, we try to perform a simplification
process on these two interfaces. It attempts to remove as
many base-complex chords as possible while ensuring
no inverted elements are generated and no mesh features
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Fig. 2  a The base-complex
of mesh. b Base-complex
sheet(red). c Base-complex
column (blue). d Base-complex
chord on interface correspond-
ing to the sheet (red)
Fig. 3  The input of our algorithm
are lost. A new subdivision strategy is proposed to bal-
ance the mesh density for preserving the mesh features.
The top-left part and top-middle part of Fig. 4 shows the
interfaces before and after simplification respectively.
2. Matching (Sect. 4). An initial matching process is per-
formed to find pairs of chords on the two interfaces that
are already matched and put them into the set M . The
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base-complex chords that are not matched are denoted
as Cu−A and Cu−B . Then, iterate over each chord in Cu−A
and Cu−B , and perform a sheet inflation operation on the
opposite interface to create a new chord so that the cur-
rent chord can be matched. The top-right part of Fig. 4
shows the two interfaces after base-complex sheet infla-
tion. After all the base-complex chords are matched, the
number of segments in a pair of chords may be different.
Thus, another step is needed to match the number of
segments for each pair of matched chords.
3. Optimization (Sect. 5). After the matching process, an
optimization process is conducted to enforce the loca-
tions of the matched points being the same, and to
improve the quality of mesh elements near the inter-
faces.
3 Interface simplification
We first simplify the base complex of the interfaces, which
will reduce the number of base-complex chords of interfaces,
and then make the matching step easier. We use the approach
proposed by Gao et al. in [25]. They proposed base-complex
column/sheet extraction using local parameterization. They
Engineering with Computers
Fig. 4  The pipeline of the proposed algorithm. The interfaces of the input meshes in every step are presented (the interfaces are in red, and the
edges and points of its base complex are in black). The final mesh is also shown
use SLIM [26] to solve it. Although it’s an expensive opera-
tion, it improves the mesh quality and ensures no inverted
elements are generated. They also proposed some crite-
ria to filter out base-complex sheets/columns that cannot
be deleted. Since our algorithm has a depth parameter, we
need to limit the modification to the local region. We add
the localization before we perform a base-complex sheet
extraction. We will discuss this detail in Sect. 3.1. And to
preserve the interface’s boundary feature, we also proposed
a new subdivision strategy after extraction, and this will be
discussed in section 3.2.
3.1 Base‑complex sheet localization
According to the definition, a base-complex sheet may span
over a large region of the mesh (see Fig. 5b). Thus, if we
directly delete a base-complex sheet, a large region of the
mesh will be affected such that the user-specified depth con-
straint will be violated. To avoid the constraint violation,
localization has to be performed before the deletion of a
base-complex sheet. The aim of a localization operation is
to change the orientation of a base-complex sheet and to
make the sheet spanning over a mesh region within depth
d (Fig. 6). And it is achieved by collapsing base-complex
columns. The details are as follows:
1. Starting from the interface, find the d th layer of the hex-
ahedral mesh and denote it as Sd (Fig. 5c). According to
the number of segments of the base-complex sheet Si
to be deleted, say n , subdivide the dth layer Sd n times
(Fig. 5d).
2. After the subdivision step, the intersection part between
Si and Sd can be regarded as a base-complex column with
segment number n. As shown in (Fig. 6a, b), to achieve
the localization of Si, we collapse this base-complex col-
umn.
After the localization process, the base-complex sheet Si is
been limited to a local region of the hexahedral mesh, and
thus it can be extracted while satisfying the depth constraint.
3.2 Base‑complex chord subdivision
During the simplification process, if we keep performing
base-complex sheet extraction, the density of the mesh will
decrease and thus affects the success rate of the parameteri-
zation of the sheet extraction operation. Besides, as the den-
sity of the mesh gets smaller, it is more difficult to preserve
the features. Therefore, we use dicing [17] to subdivide a
dual sheet of a base-complex sheet, which will not change
the base-complex structure of the mesh but increase the
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 Engineering with Computers

Fig. 5  a The base-complex

sheet to be collapsed in local
region. b The entire base-com-
plex sheet. c d th layer (green)
of hexahedral mesh. d The new
layers (red) after subdividing
twice and the original layer
(green)

Fig. 6  a The intersection of

Si and Sd is the base-complex
column to be extracted (blue). b
After extracting the base-com-
plex column, the base-complex
sheet changes its orientation

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Engineering with Computers

mesh density. If the sheet with the longest average mesh
edge length or a random base-complex sheet is chosen to
subdivide, it is probably to increase the mesh density in the
wrong direction. In this study, a subdivision strategy based
on the intersection relation is proposed to find the base-com-
plex sheet for subdivision.
Let the base-complex chord to be deleted currently be Ci ,
and the base-complex chords intersects with it be Ci1, Ci2, Ci3,
and so on (see Fig. 7a). After the deletion of Ci, the mesh and
its base-complex structure are updated. If the intersecting
base-complex chords Ci1, Ci2 , Ci3, and so on are not changed
(sometimes it may be merged with other chords), then the
base-complex chord that intersects with them the most times
is selected as the candidate chord that needs subdivision
and it is put into the set of chords Ccandi (Fig. 7). After that,
the base-complex chord in the set Ccandi with the longest
average mesh edge length is selected and its base-complex
sheet is subdivided. The number of subdivisions depends on
the number of hex elements deleted in base-complex sheet
extraction. Figure 8 shows the difference without and with
subdivision, the proposed method balances the density of
the mesh and preserves the features.
4 Matching
After the simplification step, we have two sets of base-com-
plex chords CA and CB on the two interfaces QA and QB . We
need to find which base-complex chords are already matched
and put the chord pairs into M , and put the unmatched
base-complex chords in Cu−A, Cu−B , this step is called initial
matching. Thanks to the simplification step, the number of
base-complex chords is greatly reduced at this point. Ide-
ally, if we simplify the two interfaces, all the base-complex

Fig. 7  a Ci is the base-complex

chord to be deleted, and Ci1,Ci2,
Ci3 intersect with Ci . b After
deleting the chord, Ccandi
1
, Ccandi
2

intersect with Ci1, Ci2, Ci3

Fig. 8  a The base-complex of the interface before simplification. b The interface after simplification without subdivision. c The interface after
simplification with subdivision

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Fig. 9  Two original interfaces
(top), Two interfaces after
simplification(bottom)
chords will be matched (Fig. 9). However, in most cases,
Cu−A and Cu−B are not empty. Therefore, we perform base-
complex sheet inflation to generate a new chord to match
the base-complex chord in Cu−A and Cu−B . As we mentioned
before, the base-complex structure can be considered a
coarsened hexahedral mesh so that the dual sheet inflation
can be used to inflate a base-complex sheet. In this paper, we
use the initial matching and dual sheet inflation methods pro-
posed by Chen et al. [18]. To make this paper self-contained,
we will briefly introduce them in Sect. 4.1 and Sect. 4.2(For
more details, please refer to [18]). After we perform base-
complex inflation for each base-complex chord in Cu−A and
Cu−B , all the chords are matched. Then, we iterate through
all chord pairs in M and match the number of segments of
each base-complex chord in one pair. We will discuss this
in section 4.3.
4.1 Initial matching
Let Mcandi be the set of matched chord pairs. For the given
two sets of base-complex chords CA and CB , the initial
matching is to find as many matched chord pairs as possible.
It mainly consists of three steps:
1. We first compute the Cartesian product P between CA
and CB . Then, iterate over p ∈ P to check whether it
satisfies the matching criteria listed in Sect. 2.1 and put
the valid pairs into Mcandi.
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2. The hausdorff distance between chords belonging to
each pair in Mcandi is calculated. We put the pair with
the closest distance into M .
3. We continue the above two steps until no more valid
pair can be found. Finally, the rest chords that are not
matched are put into Cu−A and Cu−B.
4.2 Base‑complex sheet inflation
The sheet inflation method proposed by Chen et al. [18]
can handle self-intersection sheets and localization of
sheets. Given a base-complex chord Cu−A i
, it first finds the
candidate nodes and edges that satisfy the matching crite-
ria listed in Sect. 2.1 on the interface QB , a polyline that is
spatially closest to the inflated chord can be found by using
Dijstra to connect the nodes and edges (Fig. 10b). Then,
an initial shrink-set is selected according to the polyline
to perform a pillowing operation [27], and it is optimized
afterward to improve the quality. After that, a new base-
complex chord on interface QB is created (see Fig. 10c),
and this new chord matches with Cu−A i
. The new chord pair
is put into M , and Cu−A is deleted from Cu−A.
i
Note that sheet inflation may not generate a new base-
complex chord sometimes, because it may not intro-
duce singularities so that the base-complex of the mesh
remains the same. In this study, after sheet inflation, we
use the edge of the newly inserted sheet as a constraint to
Engineering with Computers

Fig. 10  Base-complex sheet inflation. a Interface QA, CM

1
, CM
2
, CM
3
, CM
4
, CM
5
are the base-complex chord in M , C6 is the chord to inflated. b The
′
polylines(red) found on interface QB corresponding to C6. c The new base-complex chord(red) C6

reconstruct the base-complex of mesh, and it ensures that
the edge of the new sheet is also the base-complex edge.
4.3 Segment matching
After base-complex sheet inflation, all the base-complex
chords on the two interfaces are matched. However, this does
not guarantee the mesh elements on these two interfaces
match. Thus, it also needs to match the number of segments
for each base-complex chord pair. The number of segments is
defined as the number of dual chords in a base-complex chord.
Figure 11
′
shows the matched base-complex chord pair
CM1
and CM
1
with different number of segments. To match
the segments, the algorithm iterates over each base-complex
chord pair in the set M and processes them accordingly. Sup-
pose the current two chords of a pair are CAi and CBi , the cor-
responding number of segments is nA and nB respectively.
The segment matching process takes the following steps:
1. Calculate the average value of nA and nB, denoted as navg,
and navg ≥ 1.
2. Perform a dual sheet extraction or dual sheet subdivision
operation to make the number of segments of CAi and CBi
to be navg.
Note that in process of segment matching, the dual sheet
extraction and dual sheet subdivision operations have no
effect on the base-complex structure of the mesh. Besides,
these two operations do not introduce inverted hex ele-
ments and doublets. Thus, it is able to relax the constraint
of the depth. It means that even if the base-complex sheet
of a base-complex chord has not been localized, the extrac-
tion and subdivision operations still can be performed.
This can avoid the singularities introduced by the localiza-
tion process and thus ensure the mesh quality. However, a
parameter is also provided for users to choose whether to

′
Fig. 11  Two interfaces where the base-complex has been matched. a The segment number of CM
1
is five. b The segment number of CM
1
is seven

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 Engineering with Computers

keep the depth constraint or not. And if the constraint is ‖2 ‖J −1 ‖

2
Dt (V) = ‖
‖Jt ‖F + ‖ ‖ (3)
kept, then localization process is performed first. t
‖ ‖F
H is the hex elements set, a vertex in a hexahedron and its
three adjacent edges can form a tetrahedron. In this way, a
5 Optimization
hexahedron can construct eight different tetrahedra denoted
as t, and Vt is the volume of a tetrahedron, and Jt is the Jaco-
After the matching process, the two interfaces are conform-
bian of the transformation from t to its ideal right-angled
ing, which means the mesh topology on these two interfaces
tetrahedron. Dt (V) is the symmetric Dirichlet energy [28].
is the same. However, the matching criteria mentioned in
�
2.1 do not consider the distance between the base-complex ES (V) = ‖v − ṽ ‖2
chords. Thus, the positions of two corresponding points on (4)
vi,j ∈∀p
the two interfaces may have a large deviation from each
other. Figure 12 shows a pair of two matched interfaces with ES (V) here is the stitching term, p is the point pair which cor-
different positions of corresponding vertices. responds to each other. ṽ is the average position of vi and vj.
If we directly pull the two corresponding points together, ∑ ∑
‖v − v̄ ‖2 + � − v̄ − a d �2
it’s likely to introduce inverted hex elements. In this study, EF (V) = v∈C ∑�
v∈L v l l�
(5)
an optimization problem is solved to adjust the positions of + v∈S ‖n(v − ṽ )‖2
the corresponding points on the two interfaces. It aims to
Here, C is the corner vertices, L is the feature line vertices
stitch the corresponding points together while preventing
and S is the regular vertices on boundary surface [29], v̄ is
introducing inverted hex elements, improving the mesh qual-
the original vertex position,dl is the feature line tangent at
ity and preserving the features. This is quite similar to what
v̄ . al is an auxiliary variable added to the system for feature
the previously mentioned base-complex sheet extraction pur-
line constraints and n is the normal at v̄ .
sues. In the process of base-complex sheet extraction, the
We can still use the SLIM solver to minimize the energy,
optimal volumes of hex elements of the sheet should be zero,
and the strategy proposed by Gao et al. [25] is adopted. We
and this is equivalent to stitch the vertices of hex elements
first minimize (1) to stitch the points quickly, then minimize
together. To this end, the energy function proposed by Gao
the (2) and (5) together to improve the mesh quality.
et al. [25] is selected to formulate an optimization problem
and solved accordingly. The energy function is shown below:
min E (V) = ED (V) + 𝜆t ES (V) + 𝜆f EF (V) (1) 6 Experiment
V

Where V is the vertices of the mesh, ED (V) measures the The proposed algorithm is implemented with the program-
geometric distortion of every hex element, ES (V) stitches the ming language C++ on a 64-bit Windows 11 platform, and
corresponding points together, EF (V) measures the deviation all the tests are conducted on a six-core processor clocked at
of boundary vertices from original mesh surface. 𝜆t and 𝜆f 3.5 GHz with 16 GB of memory. The simplification step is
are the weights of ES (V) and EF (V). currently parallelized, but the code can be further optimized.
∑ ∑∑ In the tests, the maximal number of iterations of SLIM is
ED (V) = Dh (V) = Vt Dt (V) (2) set to 2, and the hausdorff distance threshold is set to 0.06
h∈H h∈H t∈h (0.0−1.0).

Fig. 12  a Interface QA(red). b Interface QB (blue). c The positions of corresponding points are different

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Engineering with Computers

6.1 Comparison with Chen’s method
Since Chen et al. [18] did not provide their code and exam-
ples, we implemented their method according to the paper.
For fairness, we also add optimization to their algorithm
while keeping other processes unchanged. We tested our
method and Chen et al.’s method in examples 1–3. Fig-
ures 13, 14, 15 and 16 show examples 1–3 inputs. In exam-
ple 1, we perform the mesh grafting algorithm [16] first. The
depth parameter of all mesh in examples 2–3 is set to 5 and
9, and there is no depth constraint in example 1. Figure 17
shows the resulting mesh and the base-complex of interfaces.
Figure 18 shows the comparison of mesh singularities and
the quality of all examples. And Table1 shows the number
of hex elements(#H), the number of singular vertices(#S),
the minimal and average scaled Jacobians (MSJ, ASJ), the
number of operations(#O), the number of base-complex
components of the interface(#B) and the time. The interface
of mesh generated by our method has a more clean regular
base-complex structure, and our results have fewer singu-
lar and base-complex components and higher quality. The
differences are especially apparent in example 1, where no
localization process is executed. In addition, our algorithm
has fewer operations in all examples. The reason is that our
algorithm modifies the base-complex of meshes to match
their topology first, and based on the idea, we simplified the

Fig. 13  Inputs of examples 1. a Two input meshes. b The interfaces of meshes

Fig. 14  Example 1: The inter-

faces after mesh grafting

Fig. 15  Inputs of examples 2. a Two input meshes. b The interfaces of meshes

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Fig. 16  Inputs of examples 3. a Two input meshes. b The interfaces of meshes

Fig. 17  Comparison with Chen et al. ’s method. Left is the resulting mesh, right is the base-complex of the interface of the resulting mesh

interface before matching which greatly reduces the number
of singular vertices and the number of operations that need
to be performed. Except for model 3, our algorithm also has
higher efficiency. The slowdown of our algorithm is due to
the parameterization in the base-complex sheet extraction,
which becomes significantly slower as the number of mesh
elements increases.
6.1.1 Mesh matching of meshes generated by different
method
Our inputs are generated by different methods such as poly-
cube-based method [3, 4], sweeping-based method [30], and
manual-based method. The inputs of example 3 are manually
generated using PointWise (Figs. 19, 20, 21), and there is no
depth constraint in example 4. The inputs of example 5 are

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Fig. 18  Left is the singularities of the resulting mesh, middle and right are scaled Jacobians statistics of the resulting mesh

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Table 1  Comparison with chen Models #H #S #B MSJ ASJ #O Time

et al.’s method
Example1
input-part1 2048 44 106 0.792 0.953 – –
input-part2 3472 72 60 0.370 0.960 – –
result(Chen’s) 7262 106 315 0.543 0.954 23 96.8s
result(Our) 5792 24 22 0.727 0.983 11 37.4s
Example2
input-part1 1040 28 71 0.761 0.946 – –
input-part2 2048 44 106 0.792 0.953 – –
result(Chen’s) 2380 171 666 0.109 0.893 19 75.4s
result(Our) 6353 148 738 0.405 0.949 13 63.4s
Example3
input-part1 11,358 170 3,706 0.421 0.945 – –
input-part2 16,745 68 252 0.370 0.978 – –
result(Chen’s) 26,125 387 6,892 0.329 0.958 22 740 s
result(Our) 48,928 305 5568 0.424 0.970 17 728 s

Fig. 19  Inputs of examples 4.

a Two input meshes. b The
interfaces of meshes

generated by [4, 30]. We first match part 1 and part 2 to get

the transition mesh. Then, we match the part 3 and transition
mesh to get the resulting mesh (Fig. 22). The depth of part
2 and part 3 is set to 4 and 5. The transition mesh and part 1
are set to no constraint. Figure 23 shows the original inter-
faces of input meshes. Figure 24 and Table 2 show the result
of example 5. In Table 2, it turns out that our algorithm has
a good result when dealing with the interface with clean
topology. Since we match the two mesh interfaces while sim-
plifying them, Our algorithm can be used to match meshes
continuously to generate more complex hexahedral meshes,
and the results are of high quality. Combined with the above
mesh generation methods, we can achieve high-quality mesh
generation for more complex models.
Fig. 20  Example 4: The interfaces after mesh grafting(left is part1,
right is part2)

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Fig. 21  Result of examples 4.

a The resulting mesh and its
interface. b The singularities
and quality of the mesh

Fig. 22  Example 5, three

meshes are matched together

7 Conclusions and future work
A hexahedral mesh matching algorithm based on base-
complex structures is proposed in this study. Compared to
existing mesh matching algorithms, the proposed algorithm
benefits from three aspects: (1) because of the adoption of
base-complex structures, the algorithm significantly reduces
the number of dual operations that need to be performed; (2)
the simplification of the interfaces and the new proposed
subdivision strategy make the matching easier and is able
to obtain cleaner interfaces with fewer singular vertices and
higher quality; (3) an optimization method is proposed to
stitch the interfaces that have been matched together, and
therefore, improves the output mesh’s quality greatly, and no
inverted elements are introduced. The presented numerical
examples verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Fig. 23  Interfaces of example

5. a Two interfaces in step 1. b
Two interfaces in step 2

Fig. 24  The transition mesh and resulting mesh of example 5. a The result in step 1. b The result in step 2

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Table 2  Results of example 4,5 Models #H #S MSJ ASJ #O Time

Example3
Input-part1 1920 8 0.860 0.995 – –
Input-part2 8616 86 0.443 0.965 – –
Result 9704 22 0.529 0.983 5 84.30s
Example4
Input-part1 5113 68 0.467 0.979 – –
Input-part2 5788 64 0.582 0.984 – –
Input-part3 5973 200 0.391 0.941 – –
Transition 20,929 143 0.373 0.970 10 239.66s
Result 30,980 356 0.219 0.969 4 105.38s

Our method performs subdivision in the simplification
step to improve the simplification rate, subsequently, we still
perform subdivision in the matching step to match the seg-
ment numbers. Therefore, the density of the result mesh is
likely to be larger than the input mesh. And if the topologies
of both input meshes are complex and similar, the number
of operations will increase. The reason is that our algorithm
prioritizes simplification over the number of operations.
However, too many operations will reduce robustness and
algorithm efficiency, especially with localization. In addi-
tion, our algorithm cannot handle arbitrary surface interfaces
with complex base-complex sheets, and our sheet inflation
method is not novel and robust enough, there is a more
robust method [19] that can handle high-quality sheet infla-
tion under complex constraints. Therefore, future work will
mainly focus on three aspects:
1. Find a method to balance the mesh density, perhaps the
segment-matching problem can be regarded as an inte-
ger programming problem. Solving and finding an opti-
mal number of segments for each base-complex chord
to make the output mesh density similar to the input
meshes.
2. Modify the algorithm flow, implement an initial match-
ing before simplification, and do not extract the matched
base-complex chords pair during simplification. Provide
a parameter to adjust the balance between simplification
rate and the number of operations.
3. Extend this algorithm to arbitrary surface interfaces and
implement a more robust sheet inflation method. Also if
the localization can be done in the depth direction and
breadth direction, the complexity of the sheet will be
greatly reduced, This is one of the keys to extending the
algorithm to arbitrary surface interfaces.
Funding This research was supported by the National Key R &D
Program of China under Grant No.2020YFB1709402, the Zhejiang
Provincial Science and Technology Program in China under Grant
2021C01108, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
U22A2033, 62202130, U1909210), the Zhejiang Provincial Science
and Technology Program in China (No.LQ22F020026), and the Open
project of State Key Laboratory of CAD & CG at Zhejiang University
(No.A2212).
Data availability Data will be made available on request.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors have no competing interests to declare
that are relevant to the content of this article.
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