Surface Scanning-Based Texture Atlas for Voxelized 3D Object

The representation of voxel colors has become crucial because voxelized 3D data are used in a variety of applications. In particular, texture atlases are widely used for representing voxel colors. The texture atlas is typically utilized for encoding voxel colors using image/video encoders, so it is important to design a texture atlas while maintaining the connectivity between voxels. In this paper, we present a texture atlas based on a surface scanning scheme. To this end, we represent a 3D object as slices, and texture strips are obtained by scanning voxels along the surface for each slice. The texture strips represent the voxel colors while preserving the connectivity of the voxels. Besides, because the texture strips are highly correlated, we construct a texture atlas by aligning texture strips. We also propose a partitioning method for a 3D object to solve the self-occlusion problem that occurs in the alignment process. As an application of the proposed texture atlases, we utilize it for encoding voxel colors and propose encoding strategies. Experimental results indicate that the proposed texture atlases outperform the previous methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use a surface scanning scheme for a texture atlas.