Schiffner,D., Ritter,M., Benger,W.
Abstract:
The display of large point clouds of planar distributions yet comes with large restrictions regarding the normal and surface reconstruction. The point data needs to be clustered or traversed to extract a local neighborhood, which is necessary to retrieve surface information. We propose the usage of the rendering pipeline to circumvent a pre-computation of the neighborhood and to perform a fast approximation of the surface. We present and compare three different methods for surface reconstruction within a post-process. These methods range from simple approximations to the definition of a tensor surface. All these methods are designed to run at interactive frame-rates. We also present a correction method to increase reconstruction quality, while preserving interactive frame-rates. Our results indicate, that the on-the-fly computation of surface normals is not a limiting factor on modern GPUs. Additionally, as the surface information is generated during the post-process, only the target display size is the limiting factor. The size of the input point cloud does not influence the performance.