A Complete Method for Reconstructing an Elevation Surface of 3D Point Clouds

Abstract

Reconstructing the surface of 3D point clouds is a reconstruction from a cloud of 3D points to a triangular mesh. This process approximates a discrete point cloud by a continuous/smooth surface depending on the input data and the applications of users. In this paper, we propose a complete method to reconstruct an elevation surface from 3D point clouds. The method consists of three steps. In the first step, we triangulate an elevation surface of 3D point cloud structured in a 3D grid. In the second step, we remove the outward triangles to deal with concave regions on the boundary of the triangular mesh. In the third step, we reconstruct this surface by filling the hole of triangular mesh. Our method could process very fast for triangulating the surface, preserve the topology and characteristic of the input surface after reconstruction.