Meshing Point Clouds Using Spherical Parameterization

Abstract

We present a simple method for meshing a 3D point cloud to a manifold genus-0 mesh. Our approach is based on recent methods for spherical embedding of planar graphs, where we use instead a k-nearest neighborhood graph of the point cloud. Our approach proceeds in two steps: We first embed the neighborhood graph on a sphere using an iterative procedure, minimizing the tangential Laplacian. Then we triangulate the embedded points and apply the resulting mesh connectivity to the input points. Besides meshing, spherical embedding of point clouds may also be used for other applications such as texture mapping or morphing.