Section: New Software and Platforms

QI: Quadrics Intersection

QI stands for “Quadrics Intersection”. QI is the first exact, robust, efficient and usable implementation of an algorithm for parameterizing the intersection of two arbitrary quadrics, given in implicit form, with integer coefficients. This implementation is based on the parameterization method described in [5] [29] and represents the first complete and robust solution to what is perhaps the most basic problem of solid modeling by implicit curved surfaces.

QI is written in C++ and builds upon the LiDIA computational number theory library [20] bundled with the GMP multi-precision integer arithmetic [19] . QI can routinely compute parameterizations of quadrics having coefficients with up to 50 digits in less than 100 milliseconds on an average PC; see [29] for detailed benchmarks.

Our implementation consists of roughly 18,000 lines of source code. QI has being registered at the Agence pour la Protection des Programmes (APP). It is distributed under a free for non-commercial use Inria license and will be distributed under the QPL license in the next release. The implementation can also be queried via a web interface [21] .

Since its official first release in June 2004, QI has been downloaded six times a month on average and it has been included in the geometric library EXACUS developed at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik (Saarbrücken, Germany). QI is also used in a broad range of applications; for instance, it is used in photochemistry for studying the interactions between potential energy surfaces, in computer vision for computing the image of conics seen by a catadioptric camera with a paraboloidal mirror, and in mathematics for computing flows of hypersurfaces of revolution based on constant-volume average curvature.