An adaptive method for smooth surface approximation to scattered 3D points

Abstract The construction of a surface from arbitrarily scattered data is an important problem in many applications. When there are a large number of data points, the surface representations generated by interpolation methods may be inefficient in both storage and computational requirements. This paper describes an adaptive method for smooth surface approximation from scattered 3D points. The approximating surface is represented by a piecewise cubic triangular Bezier surface possessing C 1 continuity. The method begins with a rough surface interpolating only boundary points and, in the successive steps, refines it by adding the maximum error point at a time among the remaining internal points until the desired approximation accuracy is reached. Our method is simple in concept and efficient in computational time, yet realizes efficient data reduction. Some experimental results are given to show that surface representations constructed by our method are compact and faithful to the original data points.