The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

3D scanning is the process of acquiring a digital copy of a physical object. A 3D scanner is used to sample points on the surface of the object (the so-called underlying surface) and acquire their Cartesian coordinates, after which a surface reconstruction algorithm is applied to generate a surface based on this sample set. We define a generalized distance function on an unoriented 3D point set and describe how it may be used to reconstruct a surface approximating these points. This distance function is shown to be a Mahalanobis distance in a higher-dimensional embedding space of the points, and the resulting reconstruction algorithm is a natural extension of the classical Radial Basis Function (RBF) approach. Experimental results show the superiority of our reconstruction algorithm to RBF and other methods in a variety of practical scenarios