Modeling with spatial patches

Spatial patches have been introduced (Ivanov and Kuzmin, 2001) as an alternative primitive for the representation of 3D objects potentially acquired from real life. Defined as range images of small regions of an object's surface, they have proven to allow for efficient storage and rendering of such surfaces, and they also exhibit great descriptive capabilities. We present several technologies that we have developed for generating 3D objects represented by spatial patches. These technologies allowed us to convert explicitly defined surfaces, textured polygonal meshes, range images and point clouds to the proposed representation. We also describe how advantageous properties of the new primitive are exploited for efficient reconstruction from range images, discuss the particular problems that we faced during our research, provide many examples to demonstrate the results that we achieved, and conclude with discussion of future work.