Efficient Spherical Harmonics Representation of 3D Objects

In this paper, we present a new and efficient spherical harmonics decomposition for spherical functions defining 3D triangulated objects. Such spherical functions are intrinsically associated to star-shaped objects. However, our results can be extended to any triangular object after segmentation into star-shaped surface patches and recomposition of the results in the implicit framework. There is thus no restriction about the genus number of the object. We demonstrate that the evaluation of the spherical harmonics coefficients can be performed by a Monte Carlo integration over the edges, which makes the computation more accurate and faster than previous techniques, and provides a better control over the precision error in contrast to the voxel-based methods. We present several applications of our research, including fast spectral surface reconstruction from point clouds, local surface smoothing and interactive geometric texture transfer.