Adaptive mesh generation for surface reconstruction: parallel hierarchical triangulation without discontinuities

The authors seek to reconstruct a polyhedral representation of surfaces from range data that can adapt to the intrinsic surface shape and that might be used as an accurate CAD model. An adaptive mesh model for hierarchical triangulation of 3-D objects is presented. An adaptive mesh generation algorithm is developed that recursively bisects mesh elements by increasing the number of mesh nodes according to surface curvatures. The recursive subdivision based on such a viewpoint-invariant feature yields the hierarchical surface triangulation that is intrinsic to the surface, and satisfies the absolute accuracy criterion. In order to avoid cracks that often occur during adaptive subdivision, an algorithm is developed that collects subdivision information by recursively expanding the region of reference until a sudden surface change is observed. Computation results on real range data of human faces are shown