Computing weak distance between the 2-sphere and its nonsmooth approximations

A novel algorithm is proposed for quantitative comparisons between compact surfaces embedded in the three-dimensional Euclidian space. The key idea is to identify those objects with the associated surface measures and compute a weak distance between them using the Fourier transform on the ambient space. In particular, the inhomogeneous Sobolev norm of negative order for a difference between two surface measures is evaluated via the Plancherel theorem, which amounts to approximating a weighted integral norm of smooth data on the frequency space. This approach allows several advantages including high accuracy due to fast-converging numerical quadrature rules, acceleration by the nonuniform fast Fourier transform, and parallelization on many-core processors. In numerical experiments, the 2-sphere, which is an example whose Fourier transform is explicitly known, is compared with its icosahedral discretization, and it is observed that the piecewise linear approximations converge to the smooth object at the quadratic rate up to small truncation.