Surface mesh denoising via diffusing gradient field

Surface mesh denoising is an important preprocess for many digital geometrical applications. Unlike most previous smoothing algorithms, which are vertex- or normal-based, we present a smoothing approach based on gradient field. The proposed algorithm first applies an extended non-local means image filter to diffuse mesh gradient field and then reconstructs a smoothed surface from the smoothed field by solving the Poisson equations in the least-squares sense. Experimental results on various data demonstrate that the proposed approach can successfully remove noise from meshes while preserving geometrical detail features of the original object and avoiding significant volume shrinkage.