An Improved Laplacian Smoothing Approach for Surface Meshes

This paper presents an improved Laplacian smoothing approach (ILSA) to optimize surface meshes while maintaining the essential characteristics of the discrete surfaces. The approach first detects feature nodes of a mesh using a simple method, and then moves its adjustable or free node to a new position, which is found by first computing an optimal displacement of the node and then projecting it back to the original discrete surface. The optimal displacement is initially computed by the ILSA, and then adjusted iteratively by solving a constrained optimization problem with a quadratic penalty approach in order to avoid inverted elements. Several examples are presented to illustrate its capability of improving the quality of triangular surface meshes.