Adaptive meshes and shells: irregular triangulation, discontinuities, and hierarchical subdivision

Adaptive meshes are dynamic networks of nodal masses interconnected by adjustable springs. They are useful for nonuniformly sampling and reconstructing visual data. This paper extends the adaptive mesh model in the following ways: it (i) develops open adaptive meshes and closed adaptive shells based on triangular and rectangular elements, (ii) proposes a discontinuity detection and preservation algorithm suitable for the model, and (iii) develops techniques for adaptive hierarchical subdivision of adaptive meshes and shells. The extended model is applied to image and 3D surface data.