Smoothing of Noisy Laser Scanner Generated Meshes Using Polynomial Fitting and Neighborhood Erosion

Abstract

This paper presents a method for removing geometric noise from triangulated meshes while preserving edges and other intended geometric features. The method iteratively updates the position of each mesh vertex with a position lying on a locally fitted bivariate polynomial. The user selects the width of the vertex neighborhood, the order of the fitted polynomial, and a threshold angle to control the effects of the smoothing operation. To avoid smoothing over discontinuities, the neighborhood can be eroded by removing vertices with normals that deviate beyond a threshold from the estimated median normal of the neighborhood. The method is particularly suitable for use on laser scanner generated meshes of automobile outer body panels. Smoothing methods used on these meshes must allow C2 continuous equilibrium surfaces and must minimize shrinkage. Despite the abundance of existing smoothing schemes, none addresses both of these specific problems. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our method with both synthetic and real world examples.