TO APPEAR IN ICPR’98 Surface reconstruction and compression using multiresolution arbitrary topology G1 continuous splines

In previous work we have developed a G continuous arbitrary topology deformable surface called ’slime’. Surface reconstruction was shown for point clouds and volumetric field functions within a conventional snake optimisation approach. Recently Hoppe has proposed an efficient alternative based on a local conjugate gradient optimisation and local mesh editing. We have been able to apply this framework to the slime representation. In this paper we present a technique using local editing operations on the arbitrary topology control mesh. In this way we can produce a surface reconstruction at multiple resolutions. In our results we show how a complex surface of 33000 planar faces can be compressed into 451 vertices (or curved patches) for very little loss of visual quality.