geometric modeling

In computer graphics and geometric modeling, shapes are often represented by triangular meshes. With the advent of laser scanning systems, meshes of extreme complexity are rapidly becoming commonplace. Such meshes are notoriously expensive to store, transmit, render, and are awkward to edit. Multiresolution analysis offers a simple, unified, and theoretically sound approach to dealing with these problems. Lounsbery et al. have recently developed a technique for creating multiresolution representations for a restricted class of meshes with subdivision connectivity. Unfortunately, meshes encountered in practice typically do not meet this requirement. In this paper we present a method for overcoming the subdivision connectivity restriction, meaning that completely arbitrary meshes can now be converted to multiresolution form. The method is based on the approximation of an arbitrary initial mesh M by a mesh M^j that has subdivision connectivity and is guaranteed to be within a specified tolerance. The key ingredient of our algorithm is the construction of a parametrization of M over a simple domain. We expect this parametrization to be of use in other contexts, such as texture mapping or the approximation of complex meshes by NURBS patches.

We present a method for solving the following problem: Given a set of data points scattered in three dimensions and an initial triangular mesh M0, produce a mesh M, of the same topological type as M0, that fits the data well and has a small number of vertices. Our approach is to minimize an energy function that explicitly models the competing desires of conciseness of representation and fidelity to the data. We show that mesh optimization can be effectively used in at least two applications: surface reconstruction from unorganized points, and mesh simplification (the reduction of the number of vertices in an initially dense mesh of triangles).