Piecewise B-spline surfaces fitting to arbitrary triangle meshes

Due to technical progress in shape acquiring from range data, triangle mesh representations of models can now be obtained conveniently. However, triangle meshes are not the final representation form in many applications, for reasons of compactness, appearance, modification, and manufacturability etc. In this paper, we present a solution for fitting smooth B-spline surfaces to triangle meshes of arbitrary topology. The procedure consists of two major phases: (1) partitioning triangle meshes of arbitrary topology into quadrilateral patches, (2) fitting tensor-product B-spline surfaces to each quadrilateral patch and keeping patches continuous across shared boundaries and corners. One merit of our solution is that it makes a reasonable tradeoff between automation and human control in complex model segmentation and surface fitting. Experiments in the paper show that our solution is practical and effective.