Variational shape approximation of point set surfaces

Abstract

In this work, we present a translation of the complete pipeline for variational shape approximation (VSA) to the setting of point sets. First, we describe an explicit example for the theoretically known non-convergence of the currently available VSA approaches. The example motivates us to introduce an alternate version of VSA based on a switch operation for which we prove convergence. Second, we discuss how two operations—split and merge—can be included in a fully automatic pipeline that is in turn independent of the placement and number of initial seeds. Third and finally, we present two approaches how to obtain a simplified mesh from the output of the VSA procedure. This simplification is either based on simple plane intersection or based on a variational optimization problem. Several qualitative and quantitative results prove the relevance of our approach.