Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

Digitization devices and scanners generate very large point sets representing complicated geometric models. Data sets typically result from multiple scans, frequently even multiple viewpoints. We discuss a method that constructs a B-Spline surface from scattered data points, usable for further processing a CAD system. The basis for our reconstruction is the decomposition of the scattered points into a 3D strip tree data structure. Our data structure is an extension of the original strip tree presented in [3]. It is similar to a quadtree, except that each node in our tree represents a bounding box whose orientation is defined by the best-fit plane approximating the data points inside the box.