Surface reconstruction and compression using multiresolution arbitrary topology G1 continuous splines

In previous work (Saminathan et al. (1997)) we have developed a G ¹ continuous arbitrary topology deformable surface called `slime´. Surface reconstruction was shown for point clouds and volumetric field functions within a conventional snake optimisation approach. Hoppe (1995) has proposed an efficient alternative based on a local conjugate gradient optimisation and local mesh editing. We have been able to apply this framework to the slime representation. In this paper we present a technique using local editing operations on the arbitrary topology control mesh. In this way we can produce a surface reconstruction at multiple resolutions. In our results we show how a complex surface of 33000 planar faces can be compressed into 451 vertices (or curved patches) for very little loss of visual quality