Reconstruction of wire structures from scanned point clouds

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for reconstructing a 3D shape from a point cloud obtained by scanning an object consisting of a wire structure. When scanning a wire structure, the point cloud has many missing parts; thus, it is difficult to apply standard methods for reconstructing a surface. To solve this problem, the proposed method first extracts the topology of a wire structure as a graph and then reconstructs the scanned object as a combination of cylindrical surfaces centered along the edges of the graph. Our method uses Delaunay tetrahedralization to make the initial edges and simplifies the edges by applying iterative edge contractions to extract the graph representing the wire topology. Furthermore, an optimization technique is applied to the positions of the cylindrical surfaces in order to improve the geometrical accuracy of the final reconstructed surface. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.