Patch Decomposition for Efficient Mesh Contours Extraction

Object-space occluding contours of triangular meshes (a.k.a. mesh contours) are at the core of many methods in computer graphics and computational geometry. A number of hierarchical data-structures have been proposed to accelerate their computation on the CPU, but they do not map well to the GPU for real-time applications, such as video games. We show that a simple, flat data-structure composed of patches bounded by a normal cone and a bounding sphere may reach this goal, provided it is constructed to maximize the probability for a patch to be culled over all viewpoints. We derive a heuristic metric to efficiently estimate this probability, and present a greedy, bottom-up algorithm that constructs patches by grouping mesh edges according to this metric. In addition, we propose an effective way of computing their bounding sphere. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that this data-structure achieves similar performance as the state-of-the-art on the CPU but is also perfectly adapted to the GPU, leading to up to ×5 speedups.