Level Set Methods and Dynamic Implicit Surfaces

Rating:
Summary: Good Level Set Book For Animation
Review: I bought this book to better understand the level set methods Fedkiw et al use in their computer animation work in fluids. Their papers often gloss over what level set methods are and how to use them (likely due to page limits in conference proceedings). This book does a very good job of getting you up to speed.

Rating:
Summary: A book for beginners and experts alike
Review: The book introduces the levelset method, starting from the very basics: the idea of implicit functions, discretization, schemes for numerically solving PDEs. It also covers advanced issues like reinitialization, particle methods, levelset for modelling objects of codimension two. Finally, an extensive section on applications from computer vision and computational physics gives the reader an idea of the power and elegance of levelset methods.
The presentation is very readable and precise enough to allow implementing the algorithms described straight away on the computer.
This is a book for beginners and experts, written by a well-known expert in the field (Osher and Seithan wrote one of the most influential papers on levelsets).

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The book is merely a collection of (way too shortened) papers from the same authors and others. Most of the time there is no coherent link between the different parts. Worst, there are many examples but very little details for each of them, when I start reading a chapter, I always end up getting the related papers from the internet which are in most cases clearer and more complete, and also there are free.

I really respect the achievement made in cg, image processing, and computational physics made by the authors (so I will give it 2 stars), but once you are done looking at the fancy pictures, you won't get much from this book apart from its bibliographic references.

I would rather recommend the book "Level set methods and fast marching methods" from J.A. Sethian, the mathematical aspects are better covered and it manages to take things into perspective while still remaining very practical.

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: This book is ABSOLUTELY among the best in the area of computational mathematics. It covers from the basics to the trendy applications, which is the biggest satisfaction I got from spending money on it. It is more than a collection of papers (no kidding!), since the contents have a good interior coherence if you read it carefully rather than browsing it like a novel. And for the those fancy pictures in the book, all I can say is that 'a picture is worth than thousands of words' - it is especially true in the area of graphics. You guys who care about SIGGRAPH should know better. More than that, this book does give you the numerical recipe for you to DIY these simulations on your own computer, besides the mathematics behind all those sexy results. Anyway, this book is worth every penny you spent!