Multi-chart geometry images

Multi-chart geometry images
Pedro Sander, Zoë Wood, Steven Gortler, John Snyder, Hugues Hoppe.
Symposium on Geometry Processing 2003, 146-155.
Surface shape represented using an atlas of charts within a regular grid.
Abstract: We introduce multi-chart geometry images, a new representation for arbitrary surfaces. It is created by resampling a surface onto a regular 2D grid. Whereas the original scheme of Gu et al. maps the entire surface onto a single square, we use an atlas construction to map the surface piecewise onto charts of arbitrary shape. We demonstrate that this added flexibility reduces parametrization distortion and thus provides greater geometric fidelity, particularly for shapes with long extremities, high genus, or disconnected components. Traditional atlas constructions suffer from discontinuous reconstruction across chart boundaries, which in our context create unacceptable surface cracks. Our solution is a novel zippering algorithm that creates a watertight surface. In addition, we present a new atlas chartification scheme based on clustering optimization.
Hindsights: There is probably room for improvement in the zippering process, which is important for uniform texture sampling.