GPU Local Triangulation: an interpolating surface reconstruction algorithm

Abstract

Abstract A GPU capable method for surface reconstruction from unorganized point clouds without additional information, called GLT (GPU Local Triangulation), is presented. The main objective of this research is the generation of a GPU interpolating reconstruction based on local Delaunay triangulations, inspired by a pre‐existing reconstruction algorithm. Current graphics hardware accelerated algorithms are approximating approaches, where the final triangulation is usually performed through either marching cubes or marching tetrahedras. GPU‐compatible methods and data structures to perform normal estimation and the local triangulation have been developed, plus a variation of the Bitonic Merge Sort algorithm to work with multi‐lists. Our method shows an average gain of one order of magnitude over previous research.