ship hull surface generation from points cloud

Question

I am a newbie about CGAL or any surface mesh generation theory. Thing is, I want to make a tool to generate a surface mesh of a ship from points cloud. The ship consists of free surfaces. Also has it some flat sides (e.g., upper deck, flat bottom, flat side and transom).

I started from an example of CGAL, surface reconstruction from points set. I guess the example can hand smooth surface well. I am wondering if the method provided from the example can handle surfaces with sharp edges. Or, I am not sure if there is easier way to make a surface mesh from point cloud.

I would be grateful if anyone give me any hint or advice about generating surface mesh on a ship hull.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In surface reconstruction, the way normals are estimated has an importance. CGAL's reconstruction algorithm takes a set of points + normals. To estimate the normals, there are several methods, more details in:

http://doc.cgal.org/latest/Point_set_processing_3/index.html#Point_set_processing_3NormalEstimation

In particular, the parameters edge_sensitivity and sharpness_angle have an importance in your case, to faithfully recover the sharp edges of the surface.

Another possibility is to segment your point set into several parts, reconstruct each part independently and then merge them.