Surface reconstruction from unorganized points

TLDR

The problem naturally arises in practical situations such as range scanning an object from multiple viewpoints, recovering biological shapes from two‑dimensional slices, and interactive surface sketching. The study presents an algorithm that reconstructs a simplicial surface from an unorganized set of 3D points.

Abstract

We describe and demonstrate an algorithm that takes as input an unorganized set of points {x l , . . . x n } ⊂ R 3 on or near an unknown manifold M, and produces as output a simplicial surface that approximates M. Neither the topology, the presence of boundaries, nor the geometry of M are assumed to be known in advance - all are inferred automatically from the data. This problem naturally arises in a variety of practical situations such as range scanning an object from multiple view points, recovery of biological shapes from two-dimensional slices, and interactive surface sketching.