Guaranteed quality triangulation of molecular skin surfaces

Abstract

We present an efficient algorithm to mesh the macromolecules surface model represented by the skin surface defined by Edelsbrunner. Our algorithm overcomes several challenges residing in current surface meshing methods. First, we guarantee the mesh quality with a provable lower bound of 21° on its minimum angle. Second, we ensure the triangulation is homeomorphic to the original surface. Third, we improve the efficiency of constructing the Restricted Delaunay Triangulation(RDT) of smooth surfaces. We achieve this by constructing the RDT using the advancing front method without computing the Delaunay tetrahedrization of the sample points on the surfaces. The difficulty of handling the front collision problem is tackled by employing the Morse theory. In particular, we construct the Morse-Smale complex to simplify the topological changes of the front. Our implementation results suggest that the algorithm decrease the time of generating high quality homeomorphic skin mesh from hours to a few minutes. © 2004 IEEE.