Computing and rendering point set surfaces

Marc Alexa, Johannes Behr, Daniel Cohen-Or, Shachar Fleishman, David Levin, Claudio T. Silva

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). The computation of points on the surface is local, which results in an out-of-core technique that can handle any point set. We show that the approximation error is bounded and present tools to increase or decrease the density of the points, thus allowing an adjustment of the spacing among the points to control the error. To display the point set surface, we introduce a novel point rendering technique. The idea is to evaluate the local maps according to the image resolution. This results in high quality shading effects and smooth silhouettes at interactive frame rates.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3-15
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume9
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2003

Keywords

  • 3D acquisition
  • Moving least squares
  • Point sample rendering
  • Surface representation and reconstruction

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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