Fast neighborhood search on polygonal meshes

We introduce a spatial index to support the fast retrieval of large neighborhoods of points on a polygonal mesh. Our spatial index can be computed efficiently off-line, introducing a negligible overhead over a standard indexed data structure. In retrieving neighborhoods of points on-line, we achieve a speed-up of about one order of magnitude with respect to standard topological traversal, while obtaining much more accurate results than straight 3D range search. We provide quantitative comparisons of results obtained with our method with respect to known techniques