With the advances in 3D digital photography and scanning technology, complex digital free-form models become ubiquitous through the processing of huge point samples. In this thesis an efficient framework for the creation of 3D digital content with point sampled geometry is proposed. A new hierarchy of shape representation with three levels is adopted in this framework. Based on this new hierarchical shape representation, a set of shape editing operators is efficiently integrated into this framework. Both graphical and industrial applications are considered in this framework. For a quantitative shape quality evaluation, a new shape evaluation criterion with a quadratic error metric is proposed to guide the shape refinement process throughout the proposed framework. For an efficient digit...[ Read more ]

With the advances in 3D digital photography and scanning technology, complex digital free-form models become ubiquitous through the processing of huge point samples. In this thesis an efficient framework for the creation of 3D digital content with point sampled geometry is proposed. A new hierarchy of shape representation with three levels is adopted in this framework. Based on this new hierarchical shape representation, a set of shape editing operators is efficiently integrated into this framework. Both graphical and industrial applications are considered in this framework. For a quantitative shape quality evaluation, a new shape evaluation criterion with a quadratic error metric is proposed to guide the shape refinement process throughout the proposed framework. For an efficient digital geometric process, detailed numerical schemes are presented and analyzed towards a high speed numerical engine inherent in the proposed framework. A great diversity of free-form shape models with various modeling operations is presented to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed framework.