Surface reconstruction of noisy and defective data sets

We present a novel surface reconstruction algorithm that can recover high-quality surfaces from noisy and defective data sets without any normal or orientation information. A set of new techniques is introduced to afford extra noise tolerability, robust orientation alignment, reliable outlier removal, and satisfactory feature recovery. In our algorithm, sample points are first organized by an octree. The points are then clustered into a set of monolithically singly-oriented groups. The inside/outside orientation of each group is determined through a robust voting algorithm. We locally fit an implicit quadric surface in each octree cell. The locally fitted implicit surfaces are then blended to produce a signed distance field using the modified Shepard's method. We develop sophisticated iterative fitting algorithms to afford improved noise tolerance both in topology recognition and geometry accuracy. Furthermore, this iterative fitting algorithm, coupled with a local model selection scheme, provides a reliable sharp feature recovery mechanism even in the presence of bad input.