Efficient view-dependent LOD control for large 3D unclosed mesh models of environments

The rapid progress of 3D modeling techniques have brought more and more applications of 3D range data in robotics. However, the 3D data we acquire with range finders mounted on mobile robots are usually too large to process in real-time, and holes and boundaries are unavoidable on the surface it represents. One method to resolve this problem is to perform mesh simplification and level of detail (LOD) control on these models. A new method based on progressive meshes (PMs) is proposed in this paper, which adopts different simplification and remeshing strategies on different boundary conditions, and therefore well preserves geometrical features on the boundaries through the simplification. The detail records are organized in a forest-shaped data structure at the same time. Hence, when a scene is reconstructed using the multiresolution models, the local details can be rapidly added by selective refinement. Furthermore, continuous view-dependent distributions of LOD are also supported to provide efficient scene representation and rendering.