Model repair in polygonal meshes using a surface oriented algorithm

The existence of artifacts in polygonal meshes makes it difficult for model operations, especially when comes to model rebuilding, rapid prototyping or other downstream applications. Model repair is the task of removing artifacts from a geometric model to produce an output model that is suitable for further processing by downstream applications that have certain quality requirements on their input. Existing model repair algorithms are capable of solving single artifact in a model. For different types of artifacts in a model, they may not result in satisfactory results. This paper proposes a surface oriented algorithm for model repair. This algorithm includes five contents: consistent normal orientation, hole filling on surface, manifolds mapping on surface, gap bridging between surface patches, mesh topology simplification. The proposed algorithm works well for different types of artifacts and can better preserve the detailed features of the original mesh.