Computer-aided Geometric Modeling of Plant Cell Shape and Design of Its Topological Retrieval Algorithms

Using the knowledge of information technology and physical mechanics to simulate the evolution of plant cell shapes is helpful to explore the mechanism of plant tissue and organ formation. However, the traditional numerical modeling based on curves and surfaces is difficult to accurately locate a geometric fragment of cell shape, resulting in the inability to analyze the stress and strain of the fragment freely. In this study, a plant cell shape is firstly decomposed into a body, faces, edges, and vertexes from top to bottom using the n-dimensional generalized mapping theory. Then, the 1-, 2-and 3-dimensional topologies of the cell shape are constructed by combining these topologies from bottom to top using the “half-edge” structure of 0-dimensional topology, and the corresponding retrieval algorithms are designed. Finally, the program is achieved by the C++ programming language and the OpenGL graphics library. The experimental results show that users could not only retrieve the geometric units of cell shape freely, but also highlight the query results in the program through the query interface of this program. The results of this study can provide an automatic topological retrieval of a cell shape for the elastic mechanical modeling of cell shape deformation.