An effective quad-dominant meshing method for unorganized point clouds

To perform quad meshing on raw point clouds, existing algorithms usually require a time-consuming parameterization or Voronoi space partition process. In this paper, we propose an effective method to generate quad-dominant meshes directly from unorganized point clouds. In the proposed method, we first apply Marinov's curvature tensor optimization to the input point cloud to reduce the umbilical regions in order to obtain a smooth curvature tensor. We then propose an efficient marching scheme to extract the curvature lines with controllable density from the point cloud. Finally, we apply a specialized K-Dimension (KD) tree structure, which converts the nearest neighbor searching problem into a sorting problem, to efficiently estimate the intersections of curvature lines and recover the topology of the quad-dominant meshes. We have tested the proposed method on different point clouds. Our results show that the proposed method produces good quality meshes with high computational efficiency and low memory requirement. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.