Surfaces generated by isosurfacing and reconstruction from points invariably contain undesirable high-frequency artifacts. For example, isosurface meshes built by Marching Cubes exhibit aliasing produced by the underlying grid structure. Similarly, meshes constructed from scanned data are virtually guaranteed to be noisy. To address these problems, a number of “smoothing” or “denoising” algorithms have been developed.
We’ll start out our discussion of smoothing by looking at the signal processing work of Taubin:
G. Taubin. A signal processing approach to fair surface design. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 1995. [PDF]
G. Taubin. Geometric signal processing on polygonal meshes. Eurographics 2000 State of the Art Report, August 2000. [PDF]
We’ll follow up with the implicit fairing method of Desbrun et al.
Here are a few other smoothing papers that present interesting techniques:
S. Fleishman, I. Drori, and D. Cohen-Or. Bilateral mesh denoising. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003, pp. 950–953, 2003. [PDF]
T. R. Jones, F. Durand, and Mathieu Desbrun. Non-iterative, feature-preserving mesh smoothing. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003, pp. 943–949, 2003. [PDF]
K. Hildebrandt and K. Polthier. Anisotropic filtering of non-linear surface features. In Proceedings of Eurographics 2004. [PDF] [Movies]
Our in-class presenter was Nick Bray, who discussed the Desbrun et al. paper on mesh fairing.