A mesh reconstruction algorithm driven by an intrinsic property of a point cloud

This paper presents an algorithm for reconstructing a triangle mesh surface from a given point cloud. Starting with a seed triangle, the algorithm grows a partially reconstructed triangle mesh by selecting a new point based on an intrinsic property of the point cloud, namely, the sampling uniformity degree. The reconstructed mesh is essentially an approximate minimum-weight triangulation to the point cloud constrained to be on a two-dimensional manifold. Thus, the reconstructed surface has only small topological difference from the surface of the sampled object. Topological correct reconstruction can be guaranteed by adding a post-processing step. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.