Fast approximate geodesic distance on point cloud

Abstract

The computation of geodesic paths and distances is a common task in many computer graphics applications, for instance obtaining 3D model measurements. Geodesic distance computation is usually performed by exact surface algorithms. However, surface reconstruction is a rather time-consuming process and does not always guarantee to get a good result in the case of missing data or cloud distortions. In this article, we propose a new fast approximate geodesic distance algorithm on the point cloud. Computer simulation results for the proposed algorithm in terms of accuracy and speed of computation are presented and discussed.