Abstract
The surface reconstruction problem from a set of wire-frame contours is very important in diverse fields such as medical imaging or computer animation. In this paper, surface triangulation method is proposed for solving the problem. Generally, many optimal triangulation techniques suffer from the large computation time but heuristic approaches may produce very unnatural surface when contours are widely different in shape. To compensate the disadvantages of these approaches, we propose a new heuristic triangulation method which iteratively decomposes the surface generation problem from a band (a pair of vertices chain) into tow subproblems from two sub-bands. Generally, conventional greedy heuristic contour triangulation algorithm, suffer from the drastic error propagation during surface modeling when the adjacent contours are different in shape. Our divide-and-conquer algorithm, called band partitioning algorithm, processes eccentric parts of the contours first with more global information. Consequently, the resulting facet model becomes more stable and natural even though the shapes are widely different. An interesting property of our method is hat it supports multi-resolution capability in surface modeling time. According to experiments, it is proved to be very robust and efficient in many applications.