Quading triangular meshes with certain topological constraints

AbstractIn computer graphics and geometric modeling, shapes are often represented by triangular meshes (also called 3D meshes or manifold triangulations). The quadrangulation of a triangular mesh has wide applications. In this paper, we present a novel method of quading a closed orientable triangular mesh into a quasi-regular quadrangulation, i.e., a quadrangulation that only contains vertices of degree four or five. The quasi-regular quadrangulation produced by our method also has the property that the number of quads of the quadrangulation is the smallest among all the quasi-regular quadrangulations. In addition, by constructing the so-called orthogonal system of cycles our method is more effective to control the quality of the quadrangulation