3D distance transform adaptive filtering for smoothing and denoising triangle meshes

In this paper we compute the distance transform of a 3D triangle mesh. A volumetric voxel representation is defined over the mesh to evaluate the distance transform. Optimizations are described to efficiently manipulate the volumetric data structure that represents the mesh. A new method for adaptive filtering of the distance transform is introduced to smooth and reduce the noise on the meshes that were reconstructed from scanned data acquired with a 3D scanner. A modified version of the Marching Cube algorithm is presented to correctly reconstruct the final mesh of the filtered distance transform defined with the voxel representation. The new filtering method is feature preserving and it is more versatile than previous algorithms described in the literature. Results show that this method outperforms previous ones in term of an error metric comparison. Future works are discussed to improve the new method and its computing performances.