Provably good sampling and meshing of surfaces

The notion of e-sample, as introduced by Amenta and Bern, has proven to be a key concept in the theory of sampled surfaces. Of particular interest is the fact that, if E is an e-sample of a smooth surface S for a sufficiently small e, then the Delaunay triangulation of E restricted to S is a good approximation of S, both in a topological and in a geometric sense. Hence, if one can construct an e-sample, one also gets a good approximation of the surface. Moreover, correct reconstruction is ensured by various algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the notion of loose e-sample. We show that the set of loose e-samples contains and is asymptotically identical to the set of e-samples. The main advantage of loose e-samples over e-samples is that they are easier to check and to construct. We also present a simple algorithm that constructs provably good surface samples and meshes. Given a smooth surface S without boundary, the algorithm generates a sparse e-sample E and at the same time a triangulated surface. The triangulated surface has the same topological type as S, is close to S for the Hausdorff distance and can provide good approximations of normals, areas and curvatures. A remarkable feature of the algorithm is that the surface needs only to be known through an oracle that, given a line segment, detects whether the segment intersects the surface and, in the affirmative, returns the intersection points. This makes the algorithm useful in a wide variety of contexts and for a large class of surfaces.