Reconstruction of Solid Models from Oriented Point Sets

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach to the surface reconstruction problem that takes as its input an oriented point set and returns a solid, water-tight model. The idea of our approach is to use Stokes' Theorem to compute the characteristic function of the solid model (the function that is equal to one inside the model and zero outside of it). Specifically, we provide an efficient method for computing the Fourier coefficients of the characteristic function using only the surface samples and normals, we compute the inverse Fourier transform to get back the characteristic function, and we use iso-surfacing techniques to extract the boundary of the solid model. The advantage of our approach is that it provides an automatic, simple, and efficient method for computing the solid model represented by a point set without requiring the establishment of adjacency relations between samples or iteratively solving large systems of linear equations. Furthermore, our approach can be directly applied to models with holes and cracks, providing a method for hole-filling and zippering of disconnected polygonal models.