Robustness Issues in Surface Reconstruction

The piecewise linear reconstruction of a surface from a sample is a well studied problem in computer graphics and computational geometry. A popular class of reconstruction algorithms lter a subset of triangles of the three dimensional Delaunay triangulation of the sample and subsequently extract a manifold from the ltered triangles. Here we report on robustness issues that turned out to be crucial in implementations.

Approximating the Medial Axis from the Voronoi Diagram with a Convergence Guarantee

The medial axis of a surface in 3D is the closure of all points that have two or more closest points on the surface. It is an essential geometric structure in a number of applications involving 3D geometric shapes. Since exact computation of the medial axis is difficult in general, efforts continue to improve their approximations. Voronoi diagrams turn out to be useful for this approximation. Although it is known that Voronoi vertices for a sample of points from a curve in 2D approximate its medial axis, similar result does not hold in 3D. Recently, it has been discovered that only a subset of Voronoi vertices converge to the medial axis as sample density approaches infinity. However, most applications need a non-discrete approximation as opposed to a discrete one. To date no known algorithm can compute this approximation straight from the Voronoi diagram with a guarantee of convergence. We present such an algorithm and its convergence analysis in this paper. One salient feature of the algorithm is that it is scale and density independent. Experimental results corroborate our theoretical claims

Shape Dimension and Approximation from Samples

There are many scientific and engineering applications where an automatic detection of shape dimension from sample data is necessary. Topological dimensions of shapes constitute an important global feature of them. We present a Voronoi based dimension detection algorithm that assigns a dimension to a sample point which is the topological dimension of the manifold it belongs to. Based on this dimension detection, we also present an algorithm to approximate shapes of arbitrary dimension from their samples. Our empirical results with data sets in three dimensions support our theory

Undersampling and Oversampling in Sample Based Shape Modeling

Shape modeling is an integral part of many visualization problems. Recent advances in scanning technology and a number of surface reconstruction algorithms have opened up a new paradigm for modeling shapes from samples. Many of the problems currently faced in this modeling paradigm can be traced back to two anomalies in sampling, namely undersampling and oversampling. Boundaries, non-smoothness and small features create undersampling problems, whereas oversampling leads to too many triangles. We use Voronoi cell geometry as a unified guide to detect undersampling and oversampling. We apply these detections in surface reconstruction and model simplification. Guarantees of the algorithms can be proved. In this paper we show the success of the algorithms empirically on a number of interesting data sets