Surface reconstruction by layer peeling

Abstract

Given an input point cloud P in R3, this paper proposes a novel algorithm to identify surface neighbors of each point p in P respecting the underlying surface S, and then to construct a piecewise linear surface for P. The algorithm utilizes the simple k-nearest neighborhood in constructing local surfaces. It makes use of two concepts: a local convexity criterion to extract a set of surface neighbors for each point, and a global projection test to determine an order for the reconstruction. Our algorithm not only produces a topologically correct surface for well-sampled point sets, but also adapts well to handle under-sampled point sets. Furthermore, the computational cost of the algorithm increases almost linearly in the size of the point cloud. It thus scales well to deal with large input point sets.