An Analysis and Implementation of a Parallel Ball Pivoting Algorithm

The problem of surface reconstruction from a set of 3D points given by their coordinates and oriented normals is a difficult problem, which has been tackled with many different approaches. In 1999, Bernardini and colleagues introduced a very elegant and efficient reconstruction method that uses a ball pivoting around triangle edges and adds new triangles if the ball is incident to three points and contains no other points. This paper details an implementation and parallelization of this algorithm. Source Code The ANSI C++ source code permitting to reproduce results from the on-line demo is available at the IPOL web page of this article1. The Ball Pivoting Algorithm is linked with patent US6968299B1, it is made available for the exclusive aim of serving as a scientific tool to verify the soundness and completeness of the algorithm description.