Digital surface regularization by normal vector field alignment

Abstract

Digital objects and digital surfaces are isothetic structures per se. Such surfaces are thus not adapted to direct visualization with isothetic quads, or to many geometry processing methods. We propose a new regularization technique to construct a piecewise smooth quadrangulated surface from a digital surface. More formally we propose a variational formulation which efficiently regularizes digital surface vertices while complying with a prescribed, eventually anisotropic, input normal vector field estimated on the digital structure. Beside visualization purposes, such regularized surface can then be used in any geometry processing tasks which operates on triangular or quadrangular meshes (e.g. compression, texturing, anisotropic smoothing, feature extraction).