Surface Reconstruction from Unstructured 3D Data

Abstract

Building 3 0 models from unstructured data is a problem that arises increasingly as new 30 scanning technology is able to produce large and complex databases of full 3 0 information. Huge efforts put into segmenting entire sets of 20 images demand robust tools that are then able to reconstruct any arbitrary 30 surface segmented from the images. In this paper we propose an algorithmic methodology that automatically produces a surface from a set of points in ?3 about which we have no topological knowledge. Our method uses a spatial decomposition and a surface tracking algorithm to produce a rough approximation S of the unknown manifold S. The produced surface S serves as a robust initialisation for a physically based modeling technique that yields the fine details of S and so improves the quality of the reconstruction.