Reconstructing surfaces from sketched 3D irregular curve networks

This paper presents a system for designing free-form surfaces starting from a sketched 3D irregular curve network. By simply dragging a smart-pen device in space, the user draws and refines arbitrary 3D style-curves that define an outline of the desired shape. Unlike previous touch-based sketching systems, the user-drawn strokes can both stay on the model surface to reconstruct parts of an existing object, or freely sketch 3D style-lines of non-existing parts to design new geometry. The wireless smart-pen device is supported by an active stereo acquisition system which makes use of two infrared cameras. For a given set of 3D curves, the system automatically constructs a lowresolution mesh that is naturally refined to produce a smooth surface which preserves curvature features defined by the user on the curve network. The interpolating surface is obtained by applying a high-order diffusion flow. We present an efficient two step approach that first diffuses curvature values preserving the curvature constraints, and then corrects the surface to fit the resulting curvature vector field and interpolating the 3D curve network. This leads to fast implementation of a feature preserving fourth order geometric flow. We show several examples to demonstrate the ability of the proposed advanced design methodology to create sophisticated models possibly having sharp creases and corners