Silhouette Smoothing by Boundary Curve Interpolation

Conspicuous and visually unpleasant polygonal silhouettes are often produced when rendering a polyhedral approximation (i.e. a polygonal mesh) of a smooth surface model, regardless whatever shading method is used to improve the appearance of the interior region. We present in this paper a technique for displaying a coarse polygonal mesh with smooth silhouette. Unlike other existing methods that assume the availability of a fine model, our method uses only a coarse mesh to generate smooth silhouette through efficient boundary curve interpolation and local remeshing near the reconstructed smooth silhouette. The time used by our method to render a polygonal mesh with smooth silhouette is about 80% more than rendering the original mesh without any fix to the polygonal silhouette.