Discrete Lagrangian algorithm for finding geodesics on triangular meshes

The present paper introduces an approximation method for finding open geodesics on triangular surfaces. The algorithm is specifically designed to be able to solve real world problems where geodesic paths are needed. We use the model of geodesic curvature flow for open curves in the Lagrangian formulation. The model is enriched with a tangential term in order to have a control over the quality of the discretization grid during the computation. The governing equation of the flow is solved by a numerical method based on a semi-implicit time discretization and a finite difference space discretization. The paper presents the numerical scheme and various implementation details as well as numerous experiments to demonstrate the performance of the method and to provide comparison with several other well known methods. We also present a Grasshopper component for Rhinoceros for finding optimal paths on surface meshes that we developed and that includes our algorithm.