Quality mesh smoothing via local surface fitting and optimum projection

The smoothness and angle quality of a surface mesh are two important indicators of the “goodness” of the mesh for downstream applications such as visualization and numerical simulation. We present in this paper a novel surface mesh processing method not only to reduce mesh noise but to improve angle quality as well. Our approach is based on the local surface fitting around each vertex using the least-square minimization technique. The new position of the vertex is obtained by finding the maximum inscribed circle (MIC) of the surrounding polygon and projecting the circle’s center onto the analytically fitted surface. The procedure above repeats until the maximal vertex displacement is less than a pre-defined threshold. The mesh smoothness is improved by a combined idea of surface fitting and projection, while the angle quality is achieved by utilizing the MIC-based projection scheme. Results on a variety of geometric mesh models have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.