Voxel-based quadrilateral mesh generation from point cloud

Abstract

In recent years point cloud has been used more and more widely in CAD and computer graphics communities due to the availability of fast and accurate laser scan devices. Many works focus on reconstructing a triangle mesh from a point cloud but few consider the quadrangulate of a point cloud directly. In this paper, a novel method which is able to achieve quad mesh models directly from a point cloud is proposed. The main idea is to use voxel as the intermediate medium between point cloud and grid to generate voxel model, then by mapping vertices of a voxel model outer surface to points to construct quad meshes. Furthermore, quad meshes are refinement through point remapping and meshes regularization to obtain high quality meshes. The experimental results show that our method can efficiently and flexible generate quad mesh based on point cloud directly with better quality and different scales. Especially, this method is much more suitable to tasks expecting less computation time and less manual interaction in rapid prototyping and reverse engineering.