Delaunay surface reconstruction from scattered points

Abstract

The use of three-dimensional digitizers in computer vision and CAD systems produces an object description consisting of a collection of scattered points in R3. In order to obtain a representation of the objects'surface it is necessary to establish a procedure that allows the recovering of their continuity, lost during the data acquisition process. A full automatic O(n2) algorithm is presented. Such algorithm obtains surface representations of free genus objects described from a set of points that belong to the original surface of the object. The only information available about each point is its position in ℝ3. The achieved surface is a Delaunay triangulation of the initial cloud of points. The algorithm has been successfully applied to three-dimensional data proceeding from synthetic and real free shape objects. copy; Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.