Survey on 3D Surface Reconstruction

The recent advent of increasingly affordable and powerful 3D scanning devices capable of capturing high resolution range data about real-world objects and environments has fueled research into effective 3D surface reconstruction techniques for rendering the raw point cloud data produced by many of these devices into a form that would make it usable in a variety of application domains. This paper, therefore, provides an overview of the existing literature on surface reconstruction from 3D point clouds. It explains some of the basic surface reconstruction concepts, describes the various factors used to evaluate surface reconstruction methods, highlights some commonly encountered issues in dealing with the raw 3D point cloud data and delineates the tradeoffs between data resolution/accuracy and processing speed. It also categorizes the various techniques for this task and briefly analyzes their empirical evaluation results demarcating their advantages and disadvantages. The paper concludes with a cross-comparison of methods which have been evaluated on the same benchmark data sets along with a discussion of the overall trends reported in the literature. The objective is to provide an overview of the state of the art on surface reconstruction from point cloud data in order to facilitate and inspire further research in this area.