Fast and Flexible Distance Transforms in CGAL

A wide variety of problems in scientific computing and data analysis need to compute accurate shortest paths and distances along curved domains (e.g., curved surfaces representing the boundary of three-dimensional objects). The Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) is a broadly-used open source framework for a wide variety of problems in geometric data analysis, but currently does not incorporate state-of-the-art methods for distance transforms. The goal of this project is to implement and integrate such methods into CGAL, specifically using methods as described in the paper "The Heat Method for Distance Computation" by Crane et al.