Silhouette enhanced point-based rendering

Abstract

With the recent advances in the 3D scanning field, the size of datasets to be displayed has increased up to billions of points. Typically, we have a dense, unstructured set of points without connectivity information. Most researchers have proposed the point-surfel association to represent the surface’s geometry and to render it using a planar approximation for each point. This paper proposes an alternative approximation, where curved surface elements (c-surfels) are employed, in order to get better adaptation to the surface to be rendered. We also use texture mapping and blending, to produce a perceptually better visualization. Improvements caused by using curved surfels instead of planar ones are especially noticeable at the object’s silhouette.