Automatic generation of coarse bounding cages from dense meshes

The coarse bounding cage of a dense mesh plays important roles in computer graphics, computer vision, and geometric design. Specifically, in volume-based deformation, a coarse bounding cage is required to manipulate the dense mesh model it enclosed; in subdivision surface fitting, the fitting starts from a coarse cage bounding the fitted dense mesh or point set; and so on. However, the generation of a coarse bounding cage is mainly by interactive ways, which are very tedious and time-consuming. In this paper, we develop a fully automatic method to generate a coarse cage bounding a dense mesh model. The automatically generated coarse bounding cage can keep the topological structure and major geometric features of the original mesh model, which is validated by theoretical analysis and experimental data presented in this paper. Further more, we employ the automatically generated coarse bounding cage in some applications, such as deformation, and subdivision fitting, producing good results.