Multi-level streaming for out-of-core surface reconstruction

Abstract: Reconstruction of surfaces from huge collections of scanned points often requires out-of-core techniques, and most such techniques involve local computations that are not resilient to data errors. We show that a Poisson-based reconstruction scheme, which considers all points in a global analysis, can be performed efficiently in limited memory using a streaming framework. Specifically, we introduce a multilevel streaming representation, which enables efficient traversal of a sparse octree by concurrently advancing through multiple streams, one per octree level. Remarkably, for our reconstruction application, a sufficiently accurate solution to the global linear system is obtained using a single iteration of cascadic multigrid, which can be evaluated within a single multi-stream pass. We demonstrate scalable performance on several large datasets.