Analysing detail preserving capabilities of bilateral, laplacian and taubin mesh filtering methods

Abstract

Mesh filtering of surfaces is crucial for noise reduction, feature preservation, and mesh simplification in graphics, visualization, and computer vision. In this paper, the detail preservation capacities of 3 frequently used filters, i.e., Bilateral, Laplacian, and Taubin mesh filters, in mesh filtering have been thoroughly examined by experiments conducted on 4 different test meshes. While the Bilateral filter excels in preserving sharp features due to its integration of geometric proximity with intensity similarity, the Laplacian filter prioritizes smoothness by averaging neighboring vertex positions, and the Taubin filter offers a balanced approach by merging attributes of both Laplacian and high-pass filters. The Bilateral filter's primary strength lies in its ability to maintain sharp features on a mesh, ensuring that intricate details are preserved by considering both the spatial closeness and intensity similarity of vertices. The Laplacian filter, although effective in achieving mesh smoothness, has the propensity to excessively smooth out sharp and defining features, potentially causing a loss of critical details in the processed mesh. The Taubin filter integrates the best of both worlds, ensuring smoothness without excessive mesh shrinkage; however, it might not excel in feature preservation as effectively as the Bilateral filter or smooth as uniformly as the Laplacian filter, making it a middle-ground option for certain applications. The statistical analysis of the experimental results has shown that the Taubin method is statistically a more successful mesh filtering method for the test sets used in this paper.