Restricted Delaunay Triangulation for Explicit Surface Reconstruction

Abstract

The task of explicit surface reconstruction is to generate a surface mesh by interpolating a given point cloud. Explicit surface reconstruction is necessary when the point cloud is required to appear exactly on the surface. However, for a non-perfect input, e.g. lack of normals, low density, irregular distribution, thin and tiny parts, high genus, etc, a robust explicit reconstruction method that can generate a high-quality manifold triangulation is missing. We propose a robust explicit surface reconstruction method that starts from an initial simple surface mesh, alternately performs a Filmsticking step and a Sculpting step of the initial mesh and converges when the surface mesh interpolates all input points (except outliers) and remains stable. The Filmsticking is to minimize the geometric distance between the surface mesh and the point cloud through iteratively performing a restricted Voronoi diagram technique on the surface mesh, while the Sculpting is to bootstrap the Filmsticking iteration from local minima by applying appropriate geometric and topological changes of the surface mesh. Our algorithm is fully automatic and produces high-quality surface meshes for non-perfect inputs that are typically considered to be challenging for prior state-of-the-art. We conducted extensive experiments on simulated scans and real scans to validate the effectiveness of our approach.