Control of Polygonal Mesh Resolution for 3-D Computer Vision

The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. government. A common representation in 3-D computer vision is the polygonal surface mesh because meshes can model objects of arbitrary shape and are easily constructed from sensed 3-D data. The reso-lution of a surface mesh is the overall spacing between vertices that comprise the mesh. Because sensed 3-D points are often unevenly distributed, the resolution of a surface mesh is often poorly defined. We present an algorithm that transforms a mesh with an uneven spacing between vertices into a mesh with a more even spacing between vertices, thus improving its definition of resolution. In addition, we show how the algorithm can be used to control the resolution of surface meshes, making them amenable to multi-resolution approaches in computer vision. The structure of our algorithm is modeled on iterative mesh simplification algorithms common in computer graphics; however, the individual steps in our algorithm are designed specifically to control mesh resolution. An even spacing between vertices is generated by applying a sequence o