Polyhedral approximation and first order segmentation of unstructured point sets

The paper is concerned with the first two steps in a surface reconstruction process. Given a set of 3D points sampled from a physical model the first problem is that of creating a polyhedral approximation of the model. For that the authors introduce an algorithm which extends Boissonnat's (1984) work. It allows the reconstruction of objects with arbitrary genus and proposes an automatic termination procedure. The next step in the process concerns the segmentation of the data points into regions for which each may be fitted by a single surface. They summarize some experiences with a region growing technique based on angle between normals criteria. Using just first order derivative estimations it is shown that the method is able to classify segments into predefined second order surface classes.