Surface Reconstruction - An Introduction

The goal of surface reconstruction is to find a surface from a given finite set of geometric sample values. In many applications, the sample values are points. But other types of samples, like curves occurring e.g. in tactile sampling by an adapted milling machine, or volume densities occurring for instance in X-ray based computer tomography, are also possible. We illuminate different aspects of the problem and give a brief survey of the work performed in the past.