Incremental reconstruction of sharp edges on mesh surfaces

Limited by the regular grids in computing, many modelling approaches (e.g. field-based methods) sample 3D shape insensitive to sharp features therefore exhibit aliasing errors, by which a lot of sharp edges and corners are lost on the reconstructed surface. An incremental approach for recovering sharp edges on an insensitive sampled triangular mesh is presented in this paper, so that shape approximation errors are greatly reduced. Either chamfered or blended sharp edges on an input triangular mesh could be successfully reconstructed by the signals inherent in the mesh. As a non-iterative method, our approach could be finished in a very short time comparing to those diffusion-based sharp-feature reproducers. The region embedding sharp features is first identified through normal variations. The positions of vertices in the sharp-feature embedded region are then predicted progressively from outer to the inner of sharp regions so that sharp edges could be recovered in the sense of region shrinking. q 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.