Visualization of Point-Based Surfaces with Locally Reconstructed Subdivision Surfaces

Point-based surfaces (i.e. surfaces represented by discrete point sets which are either directly obtained by current 3D acquisition devices or converted from other surface representations) are well designed for multiresolution storage and transmission ofcomplex objects. Unfortunately, visualization of point-based surfacesrequires to develop specific rendering techniques (e.g. splatting)as point sets are not well adapted to existing graphics hardwarewhich are optimized for polygonalmeshes. In this paper, we propose an efficient reconstruction and visualization technique of pointbased surfaces that takes full benefit from the whole optimized pipelineimplemented in graphics hardware. The basic idea is to generatea set of independent meshes using a local 2D Delaunay triangulationof the point set. These meshes are then glued together to get a"visual continuity" by using a subdivision process.