Reverse engineering is concerned with the reconstruction of surfaces from three-dimensional point clouds originating from laser-scanned objects. We present an adaptive surface reconstruction method providing a hierarchy of quadrilateral meshes adapting surface topology when a mesh is refined. This way, a user can choose a model with proper resolution and topology from the hierarchy without having to run the algorithm multiple times with different parameters. The multiresolution mesh representation can be used subsequently for view-dependent rendering and wavelet compression. 1 Motivation Computer-based surface models are indispensable in several fields of science and engineering. For example, the design and manufacturing of vehicles, such as cars and aircrafts, would not be possible without sophisticated CAD and simulation tools predicting the behavior of the product. On the other hand, designers often do not like working on virtual models, though sophisticated tools and immersive V...
P. Keller, Martin Bertram, Hans Hagen