A hole-filling strategy for reconstruction of smooth surfaces in range images

Creating models of real scenes is a complex task for which the use of traditional modelling techniques is inappropriate. For this task, laser rangefinders are frequently used to sample the scene from several viewpoints, with the resulting range images integrated into a final model. In practice, due to surface reflectance properties, occlusions and accessibility limitations, certain areas of the scenes are usually not sampled, leading to holes and introducing undesirable artifacts in the resulting models. We present an algorithm for filling holes on surfaces reconstructed from point clouds. The algorithm is based on moving least squares and can recover both geometry and shading information, providing a good alternative when the properties to be reconstructed are locally smooth. The reconstruction process is mostly automatic and the sampling rate in the reconstructed areas follows the given samples. We demonstrate the use of the algorithm on both real and synthetic data sets to obtain complete geometry and reasonable shading.