A double layer method for constructing signed distance fields from triangle meshes

Abstract

A new algorithm is proposed for constructing signed distance fields (SDF) from triangle meshes. In our approach, both the internal and external distance fields for the triangle mesh are computed first. Then the desired SDF is computed directly from these two distance fields. As only points are used to generate the distance fields, some complicated operations, such as the computation of the distance from a point to a triangle, are avoided. Our algorithm is in a very simple form and is straightforward to parallelize. Actually, we have implemented it by use of the OpenCL API and a CPU-to-GPU speedup ratio of 10-40 is obtained. Further, this method is validated by our numerical results. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.