A direction-oriented sharpness dependent filter for 3D polygon meshes

In this paper, we propose a direction-oriented sharpness dependent filter for smoothing a noisy polygon mesh model that contains a large amount of noise. The goal is to remove the noise so that the model conforms to the shape of the original model. The proposed filter consists of a pre-processing step and a filtering process. In the pre-processing step, a smoothed reference model is derived from the input noisy mesh model such that the flow direction field of the smoothed reference model is almost identical to that of the original model. The subsequent filtering process is a linear combination of isotropic smoothing and anisotropic smoothing. This design allows the filter to gradually recover fine structures and remove noise by reconstructing the face direction of the input noisy mesh model so that it is the same as that of the smoothed reference model. Our experiment results show that the proposed direction-oriented sharpness dependent filter can effectively recover noisy models so that they conform to the shape of the original models.