Sharp feature preserving MLS surface reconstruction based on local feature line approximations

Sharp features in manufactured and designed objects require particular attention when reconstructing surfaces from unorganized scan point sets using moving least squares (MLS) fitting. It’s an inherent property of MLS fitting that sharp features are smoothed out. Instead of searching for appropriate new fitting functions our approach computes a modified local point neighborhood so that a standard MLS fitting can be applied enhanced by sharp features reconstruction. We present a two-stage algorithm. In a pre-processing step sharp feature points are marked first. This algorithm is robust to noise since it is based on Gauss map clustering. In the main phase, the selected feature points are used to locally approximate the feature curve and to segment and enhance the local point neighborhood. The MLS projection thus leads to a piecewise smooth surface preserving all sharp features. The method is simple to implement and able to preserve line-type features as well as corner-type features during reconstruction.