Reconstruction of 3D Delaunay surface models of complex objects

A system is presented for the automated reconstruction of complete 3D models of arbitrarily shaped objects from multiple 2.5D range images. The system enables reliable reconstruction of 3D models of complex objects. This is achieved without a priori knowledge about the object to be modelled. Potential application domains include reverse engineering of 3D models for graphics and CAD. Geometric fusion is achieved by integration of multiple range images into a single 3D implicit surface representation. The implicit surface provides a framework for integration of redundant overlapping measurements to obtain consistent reconstruction of the local surface geometry and topology. Triangulated 3D models are reconstructed using an implicit surface polygonisation algorithm. Standard techniques such as Marching Cubes are computationally expensive, require all data a priori and result in inefficient representations. A new surface based implicit surface polygonisation algorithm 'Marching Triangles' is presented to overcome the limitations of previous volumetric approaches. Marching Triangles uses a local 3D constraint to construct a Deluanay triangulation of a manifold surface in 3D space. This approach enables dynamic integration of new data, efficient representation and reduced computational cost. An approximate volumetric representation is used for efficient evaluation of the implicit surface. Results are demonstrated for the reconstruction of models of complex objects.