Various shape regularization algorithms
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I deal with a lot of geometry stuff at work with computer vision and photogrammetry, which usually comes from the real world. It's seldom clean and neat, and I'm often trying to find a way to "make it nice" or "make it pretty". I've always struggled with what that really means formally.That led me to shape regularization (a technique used in computational geometry to clean up geometric data). CGAL had implemented a few methods for that, but there are more ways to do it, which I thought were nice. Also I typically work in Python, so it was nice to have a pure Python library could handle this.I struggled to get the first version working as a QP. At a high level most of these boil down to minimizing a cost A + B where A is the cost associated the geometry and goes up the more you move it, and B is the cost associated "niceness" or rather the constraints you impose, and goes down the more you impose them. Then you try and minimize A + B or rather HA + (1-H)B where H is a hyper-parameter that controls the relative importance of A and B.I needed a Python implementation so started with the examples implemented in CGAL then added a couple more for snap and joint regularization and metric regularization.
HN · launched Jan 9, 2026 · 78 upvotes (top 13%) · 0 views
Niche: specialized algorithms and computing libraries · 230 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -73% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 230 launches in specialized algorithms and computing libraries →
Could you build this?
No Implementing shape regularization algorithms from scratch requires deep mathematical expertise in computational geometry, optimization algorithms, and photogrammetry.
What it would actually take: The architecture involves native C++ or Rust numerical optimization libraries (like Ceres Solver or CGAL) compiled or wrapped for Python/Wasm. The hard core involves defining geometric energy functions (orthogonalities, parallelisms, co-planarity constraints) and solving non-linear least squares optimizations over noisy point clouds or meshes. This requires an engineer with specialized background in computer vision, photogrammetry, and applied mathematics.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Polylabel (Mapbox)
Feature requests: Numba acceleration for performance, Automatic label positioning around shapes, Design principles for non-cluttered label placement
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 91 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 92 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 66 days after the earliest competitor.
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