Filling holes on locally smooth surfaces reconstructed from point clouds

Creating models of real scenes is a complex task for which the use of traditional modeling techniques is inappropriate. For this task, laser rangefinders are frequently used to sample the scene from several viewpoints, with the resulting range images integrated into a final model. In practice, due to surface reflectance properties, occlusions and accessibility limitations, certain areas of the scenes are usually not sampled, leading to holes and introducing undesirable artifacts in the resulting models. We present an algorithm for filling holes on surfaces reconstructed from point clouds. The algorithm is based on moving least squares and can interpolate both geometry and shading information. The reconstruction process is mostly automatic and the sampling rate of the given samples is preserved in the reconstructed areas. We demonstrate the use of the algorithm on both real and synthetic datasets to obtain complete geometry and plausible shading.