Marching cubes in an unsigned distance field for surface reconstruction from unorganized point sets

Abstract

Surface reconstruction from unorganized point set is a common problem in computer graphics. Generation of the signed distance field from the point set is a common methodology for the surface reconstruction. The reconstruction of implicit surfaces is made with the algorithm of marching cubes, but the distance field of a point set can not be processed with marching cubes because the unsigned nature of the distance. We propose an extension to the marching cubes algorithm allowing the reconstruction of 0-level iso-surfaces in an unsigned distance field. We calculate more information inside each cell of the marching cubes lattice and then we extract the intersection points of the surface within the cell then we identify the marching cubes case for the triangulation. Our algorithm generates good surfaces but the presence of ambiguities in the case selection generates some topological mistakes.