Reach For the Arcs:
Reconstructing Surfaces from SDFs via Tangent Points

SIGGRAPH 2024

Silvia Sellán, University of Toronto

Yingying Ren, EPFL

Christopher Batty, University of Waterloo

Oded Stein, University of Southern California

Figure 1. Our Reach for the Arcs algorithm consistently produces a more faithful mesh reconstruction from discrete SDF data at low and moderate resolutions compared to alternatives, as demonstrated on this nonzero genus Nightingale shape.

Abstract

We introduce an algorithm to reconstruct a mesh from discrete samples of a shape's Signed Distance Function (SDF). A simple geometric reinterpretation of the SDF lets us formulate the problem through a point cloud, from which a surface can be extracted with existing techniques. We extract all possible information from the SDF data, outperforming commonly used algorithms and imposing no topological or geometric restrictions.

Links

Cite as

@inproceedings{Sellan2024RFTA,
author = {Sell\'{a}n, Silvia and Ren, Yingying and Batty, Christopher and Stein, Oded},
title = {Reach For the Arcs: Reconstructing Surfaces from SDFs via Tangent Points},
year = {2024},
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH 2024 Conference Papers},
articleno = {25},
numpages = {11}
}

Acknowledgements

This work received support from NSERC (Grant RGPIN-2021-02524), CFI (JELF Project 40132), an NSERC Vanier Scholarship, and SNSF (Grant FNS 514543 / CF 1156).

We thank Abhishek Madan, Nicholas Sharp, Chenxi Liu, Victor Rong, Dylan Rowe, and Kinjal Parikh for technical help and proofreading; Michael Kazhdan for his help with the official sPSR implementation; Eitan Grinspun and David Levin for their insightful suggestions regarding rasterization; and Daniella Sarit Levy for providing the mesh and poses for one of our figures.

We acknowledge and thank the authors of the 3D models used throughout this paper. See the paper for a detailed list.