Isotopic approximation within a tolerance volume

Abstract

We introduce in this paper an algorithm that generates from an input tolerance volume a surface triangle mesh guaranteed to be within the tolerance, intersection free and topologically correct. A pliant meshing algorithm is used to capture the topology and discover the anisotropy in the input tolerance volume in order to generate a concise output. We first refine a 3D Delaunay triangulation over the tolerance volume while maintaining a piecewise-linear function on this triangulation, until an isosurface of this function matches the topology sought after. We then embed the isosurface into the 3D triangulation via mutual tessellation, and simplify it while preserving the topology. Our approach extends to surfaces with boundaries and to non-manifold surfaces. We demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of our approach on a variety of data sets and tolerance volumes.