Direct (Re)Meshing for Efficient Surface Processing

Many geometry processing techniques exploit the connection between shape and connectivity in triangle meshes to enable advanced processing of the data. These techniques face the challenge that triangle meshes, whether generated by a modeling tool or by 3D scanning, typically contain low quality triangles. The process of constructing good meshes out of sub-optimal ones is termed surface remeshing. Some form of surface remeshing is often applied as a preor post-processing step in many geometry processing algorithms, even if only implicitly. We propose a novel surface remeshing algorithm. While many remeshing algorithms are based on global parametrization or local mesh optimization, our algorithm is closely related to surface reconstruction techniques and it requires no explicit parameterization. Our approach is based on the advancing-front paradigm, and it can be used to both incrementally remesh the complete surface, or simply to remesh a portion of it with a high-quality mesh. It is accurate, fast, robust, and suitable for use with interactive mesh processing applications that require local remeshing. We show a number of applications, including matching the resolution of meshes when doing boolean operations such as unions and intersections. We also show how to adapt the algorithm to blend and merge mixed-mode objects for example, to compute the union of a point-set surface and a triangle mesh. Direct (Re)Meshing for Efficient Surface Processing John Schreiner Carlos E. Scheidegger Shachar Fleishman Cláudio T. Silva