How to avoid hole filling in surface reconstruction?

Question

I am using Poisson surface reconstruction algorithm to reconstruct triangulated mesh surface from points. However, Poisson will always generate a watertight surface, which fills all holes with interpolation.

For some small holes that is the result of data missing, this hole filling is desirable. But for some big holes, I do not want hole filling and just want the surface to remain open.

The figure above shows my idea, the left one is a pointset with normal, the right one is reconstructed surface. I want the top of this surface remains open rather than current watertight result.

Can anyone provide me with some advice, how may I keep these big holes in Poisson surface reconstruction? Or is there any other algorithms that could solve this?

P.S. Based on the accepted answer to this question, I understand surface reconstruction algorithms could be categorized as explicit ones and implicit ones. Poisson is implicit ones, and explicit ones could naturally handle big hole problem. But since the points data I have are mostly sparse and noisy, I would prefer an implicit one like Poisson.

You can try the advancing front surface reconstruction algorithm from CGAL that will use only input points for the output. — sloriot
Thank you sloriot for you advice, actually I have tried most cgal reconstruction methods, since my data is mostly sparse and noisy, I do need an implicit reconstruction method like poisson. Thank your anyway! — Summer Sun

Nico Schertler Nico Schertler · Accepted Answer · 2018-07-03T20:16:21

Your screenshots look like you might be using MeshLab's implementation which is based on an old implementation. This implementation is not capable of trimming the surface.

The latest implementation, however, contains the SurfaceTrimmer that does exactly what you want. Take a look at the examples at the bottom of the page to see how to use it.

To use SurfaceTrimmer program, you have to first use SSDRecon program to reconstruct a mesh surface with --density, then setting a trim value would exactly remove faces under a specific threshold.

Below is a sample usage of that program on the demo eagle data

./SSDRecon --in eagle.points.ply --out eagle.screened.color.ply --depth 10 --density
./SurfaceTrimmer --in eagle.screened.color.ply --out eagle.screened.color.trimmed.ply --trim 7

How to avoid hole filling in surface reconstruction?

1 Answers