In this paper, we present a robust method for creating a triangulated surface mesh from multiple range images. Our method merges a set of range images into a volumetric implicit-surface representation which is converted to a surface mesh using a variant of the marching-cubes algorithm. Unlike previous techniques based on implicit-surface representations, our method estimates the signed distance to the object surface by nding a consensus of locally coherent observations of the surface. We call this method the consensus-surface algorithm. This algorithm e ectively eliminates many of the troublesome e ects of noise and extraneous surface observations without sacri cing the accuracy of the resulting surface. We utilize octrees to represent volumetric implicit surfaces|e ectively reducing the computation and memory requirements of the volumetric representation without sacri cing accuracy of the resulting surface. We present results which demonstrate that our consensus-surface algorithm can...
Mark D. Wheeler, Yoichi Sato, Katsushi Ikeuchi