Optimal Surface Smoothing as Filter Design

Smooth surfaces are approximated by polyhedral surfaces for a number of computational purposes. An inherent problem of these approximation algorithms is that the resulting polyhedral surfaces appear faceted. Within a recently introduced signal processing approach to solving this problem [7, 8], surface smoothing corresponds to low-pass filtering. In this paper we look at the filter design problem in more detail. We analyze the stability properties of the low-pass filter described in [7, 8], and show how to minimize its running time. We show that most classical techniques used to design finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters can also be used to design significantly faster surface smoothing filters. Finally, we describe an algorithm to estimate the power spectrum of a signal, and use it to evaluate the performance of the different filter design techniques described in the paper.