An effective hole detection method for 3D models

An automatic hole detection approach is proposed for triangular mesh models in this paper. Different to some other existing methods, the proposed method here aims to find solid holes inside 3D models instead of detecting polygon missing regions for geometry incorrect 3D models. In the method, a number of planes are firstly detected by grouping interconnected coplanar triangles, then model contour is extracted from the boundaries of adjacent planes, and after that model vertices are grouped into several disjoint clusters based on the extracted contour. By analyzing the relationship between planes and vertex clusters, all the holes inside 3D models are finally identified. Experiments verify that our method is efficient and effective.