SSD-C: Smooth Signed Distance Colored Surface Reconstruction

In this chapter we address the problem of reconstructing the surface geometry, topology, and color map of a 3D scene from a finite set of colored oriented points. These data sets are nowadays obtained using a variety of techniques, including multi-view stereo reconstruction methods from multiple 2D images. We describe a novel variational method which reduces the problem to the solutions of sparse systems of linear equations. We first use the point positions and orientation vectors to reconstruct the geometry and topology of a watertight surface represented as an adaptively tesselated polygon mesh. The method then smoothly extrapolates the color information from the points to the surface. Experimental evidence is presented to show that the resulting method produces high quality polygon meshes with smooth color maps which accurately approximate the source colored oriented points.