Surface and normal ensembles for surface reconstruction

The majority of the existing techniques for surface reconstruction and the closely related problem of normal reconstruction are deterministic. Their main advantages are the speed and, given a reasonably good initial input, the high quality of the reconstructed surfaces. Nevertheless, their deterministic nature may hinder them from effectively handling incomplete data with noise and outliers. An ensemble is a statistical technique which can improve the performance of deterministic algorithms by putting them into a statistics based probabilistic setting. In this paper, we study the suitability of ensembles in normal and surface reconstruction. We experimented with a widely used normal reconstruction technique [Hoppe H, DeRose T, Duchamp T, McDonald J, Stuetzle W. Surface reconstruction from unorganized points. Computer Graphics 1992;71–8] and Multi-level Partitions of Unity implicits for surface reconstruction [Ohtake Y, Belyaev A, Alexa M, Turk G, Seidel H-P. Multi-level partition of unity implicits. ACM Transactions on Graphics 2003;22(3):463–70], showing that normal and surface ensembles can successfully be combined to handle noisy point sets.