Point Morphology (SIGGRAPH 2014 Guest Talk)

We introduce a complete morphological analysis framework for 3D point clouds. Starting from an unorganized point set sampling a surface, we propose morphological operators in the form of projections, allowing to sample erosions, dilations, closings and openings of an object without any explicit mesh structure. Our framework supports structuring elements with arbitrary shape, accounts robustly for geometric and morphological sharp features, remains efficient at large scales and comes together with a specific adaptive sampler. Based on this meshless framework, we propose applications which benefit from the non-linear nature of morphological analysis and can be expressed as simple sequences of our operators, including medial axis sampling, hysteresis shape filtering and geometry-preserving topological simplification.