A Graph–Based Approach to Surface Reconstruction

Abstract A new approach to the reconstruction of a surface from an unorganized set of points in space is presented. The point set may for example be obtained with a laser scanner or a manual digitizing tool, and is the only source of information about the shape of the acquired object. The basic idea is to calculate the Euclidean minimum spanning tree (EMST) of the given points. The EMST is then augmented to the so‐called surface description graph (SDG). Finally the wire frame defined by the SDG are filled with triangles. The advantage of our approach is that also highly non‐convex and even disconnected surfaces are reconstructed quite reliably. This is demonstrated for a variety of data sets.