Piecewise smooth surface reconstruction

Hugues Hoppe, Tony DeRose, Tom Duchamp, Michael Halstead, Hubert Jin, John McDonald, Jean Schweitzer, Werner Stuetzle.

ACM SIGGRAPH 1994 Proceedings, 295-302.

Subdivision surfaces with sharp features, and their automatic creation by data fitting.

Abstract: We present a general method for automatic reconstruction of accurate, concise, piecewise smooth surface models from scattered range data. The method can be used in a variety of applications such as reverse engineering — the automatic generation of CAD models from physical objects. Novel aspects of the method are its ability to model surfaces of arbitrary topological type and to recover sharp features such as creases and corners. The method has proven to be effective, as demonstrated by a number of examples using both simulated and real data.
A key ingredient in the method, and a principal contribution of this paper, is the introduction of a new class of piecewise smooth surface representations based on subdivision. These surfaces have a number of properties that make them ideal for use in surface reconstruction: they are simple to implement, they can model sharp features concisely, and they can be fit to scattered range data using an unconstrained optimization procedure.

Hindsights: Through general optimization, this method is able to infer sharp features in the underlying geometry by simply fitting the data points. With the growing interest in subdivision surfaces, this surface fitting technique may prove useful. The paper is often cited for its introduction of sharp features in subdivision surface schemes. These features were extended in the work of Biermann et al. The SIGGRAPH 1998 paper by DeRose et al. presents extensions for "fractionally smooth" surface features.