A Hybrid Hole-filling Algorithm

Abstract

A polygon mesh, or a 3D mesh, consisting of a collection of vertices, edges, and polygons in three-dimensional space, is the standard way of representing 3D objects. In practice, polygon meshes acquired from the 3D scanning process fail to meet the quality requirements for most practical applications. Mesh defects like holes, duplicate elements, non-manifold elements are introduced during the scanning process, which lowers the quality of the output meshes. In this thesis, we describe a complete mesh-repairing process that fixes all defects within a polygon mesh. This process is divided into two parts: the mesh-cleaning part and the hole-filling part. In the mesh-cleaning part, we describe the ways of repairing different types of mesh defects. In the hole-filling part, we discuss two main hole-filling approaches: the surface-based method and the volumetric. In addition, we present a hybrid algorithm by combining the surface-based approach and the volumetric approach. We compare the meshes created by different hole-filing algorithms and show that the new algorithm is a good alternative to the existing ones.