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 of complex objects. Unfortunately, visualization of point-based surfaces requires to develop specific rendering techniques (e.g. splatting) as point sets are not well adapted to existing graphics hardware which are optimized for polygonal meshes. In this paper, we propose an efficient reconstruction and visualization technique of point-based surfaces that takes full benefit from the whole optimized pipeline implemented in graphics hardware. The basic idea is to generate a set of independent meshes using a local 2D Delaunay triangulation of the point set. These meshes are then glued together to get a "visual continuity" by using a subdivision process.