Power Crust, Unions of Balls,
and the
Medial Axis Transform

          Nina Amenta   - Sunghee Choi   - Ravi Krishna Kolluri

 
A set of input points from the surface of an object, the watertight output mesh, and a simplified version of the approximate medial axis.

The power crust is an algorithm  for 3D surface reconstruction which is based on the medial axis transform. Given  a set of sample points S from the boundary F of a three-dimensional object, it produces a mesh representing the original surface and also an approximation to the medial axis of the solid bounded by F. When S is sufficiently dense, the power crust is guaranteed to produce a geometrically and topologically correct approximation to the surface. While most samples fail to be sufficiently dense somewhere, the power crust seems to do a good job in practice. One thing we can guarantee is that the output mesh is the `watertight' boundary of some three-dimensional solid, no matter how crazy the input is.



This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant NSF/CCR-9731977