Generation of Triangle Meshes from Time-of-Flight Data for Surface Registration

One approach to intra-operative registration in computerassisted medical interventions involves matching intra-operatively acquired organ surfaces with pre-operatively generated high resolution surfaces. The matching is based on so-called curvature descriptors assigned to the vertices of the two meshes. Therefore, high compliance of the input meshes with respect to curvature properties is essential. Time-of-Flight cameras can provide the required surface data during the intervention as a point cloud. Although different methods for generation of triangle meshes from range data have been proposed in the literature, their effect on the quality of the mesh with respect to curvature properties has not yet been investigated. In this paper, we evaluate six of these methods and derive application-specific recommendations for their usage.