Improved Laplacian Smoothing of Noisy Surface Meshes

Abstract

This paper presents a technique for smoothing polygonal surface meshes that avoids the well-known problem of deformation and shrinkage caused by many smoothing methods, like e.g. the Laplacian algorithm. The basic idea is to push the vertices of the smoothed mesh back towards their previous locations. This technique can be also used in order to smooth unstructured point sets, by reconstructing a surface mesh to which the smoothing technique is applied. The key observation is that a surface mesh which is not necessarily topologically correct, but which can efficiently be reconstructed, is sufficient for that purpose.