Real-Time Point Cloud Refinement

Abstract

Splatting-based rendering techniques are currently the best choice for efficient high quality rendering of pointbased geometries. However, such techniques are not suitable for large magnification, especially when the object is under-sampled. This paper improves the rendering quality of pure splatting techniques using a fast dynamic up-sampling algorithm for point-based geometry. Our algorithm is inspired by interpolatory subdivision surfaces where the geometry is refined iteratively. At each step the refined geometry is that from the previous step enriched by a new set of points. The point insertion procedure uses three operators: a local neighborhood selection operator, a refinement operator (adding new points) and a smoothing operator. Even though our insertion procedure makes the analysis of the limit surface complicated and it does not guarantee its G1 continuity, it remains very efficient for high quality real-time point rendering. Indeed, while providing an increased rendering quality, especially for large magnification, our algorithm needs no other preprocessing nor any additional information beyond that used by any splatting technique.