While making some serious progress on texturing scanned surfaces, we ran into need of a more decent surface reconstruction and decimation technique. Until now, exported meshes contained hundreds of thousands of triangles, adding unnecessary overhead in regions that could be expressed with just a couple of triangles (e.g planar regions). Additionally, we felt the need of closing small surface holes in order to allow smooth texturing across the surface.

Therefore we re-designed our surface reconstruction pipeline to support more sophisticated reconstruction techniques and a configurable surface decimation pipeline.

Below is an image that shows the original mesh as generated by the current version of ReMe (v. 0.6.0-405). It contains roughly 250.000 faces and one can clearly spot the holes that remained due to the lack of visibility of these areas while scanning.

In contrast, the next image shows a successful reconstruction of the original surface reduced to 50.000 faces with boundary holes closed.

Comparing both meshes using the Hausdorff distance gives an average distance of 0.8 mm. The image below colorizes the distances (blue low, red high).

Surface reconstruction isn’t limited to individual meshes, but can also be used to fusion multiple volumes into one single consistent mesh. The image below shows two individual stitched meshes using ReMe’s --multiscan feature.

Here is the fusioned mesh as generated by the development version of ReMe

Stay tuned!

Thanks to all that contributed in our feature survey on Google+. We adapted our internal road-map due to it’s results and will head for texture support and an easy to use graphical user interface next.

Even though it’s still early days, we’d like to share what can be accomplished using our texturing engine. We are aiming at a semi-automatic solution where users are attaching textures through a post-processing step. This allows us to use arbitrary cameras for texturing the mesh. Our engine supports multiple textures and combines them smoothly.

The first image below shows the plain surface reconstructed in high resolution mode. Next to it an image taken with an Casio Exilim ZR 100 to be used as texture. On the right the final textured mesh is shown.

The best part about it, it took less than 3 minutes from scanning to texturing for the above scenario. We will probably release this feature alongside with the first version of the UI around late summer.

Enjoy!