Surface Remeshing: A Systematic Literature Review of Methods and Research Directions

Abstract

Triangle meshes are used in many important shape-related applications including geometric modeling, animation production, system simulation, and visualization. However, these meshes are typically generated in raw form with several defects and poor-quality elements, obstructing them from practical application. Over the past decades, different surface remeshing techniques have been presented to improve these poor-quality meshes prior to the downstream utilization. A typical surface remeshing algorithm converts an input mesh into a higher quality mesh with consideration of given quality requirements as well as an acceptable approximation to the input mesh. In recent years, surface remeshing has gained significant attention from researchers and engineers, and several remeshing algorithms have been proposed. However, there has been no survey article on remeshing methods in general with a defined search strategy and article selection mechanism covering the recent approaches in surface remeshing domain with a good connection to classical approaches. In this article, we present a survey on surface remeshing techniques, classifying all collected articles in different categories and analyzing specific methods with their advantages, disadvantages, and possible future improvements. Following the systematic literature review methodology, we define step-by-step guidelines throughout the review process, including search strategy, literature inclusion/exclusion criteria, article quality assessment, and data extraction. With the aim of literature collection and classification based on data extraction, we summarized collected articles, considering the key remeshing objectives, the way the mesh quality is defined and improved, and the way their techniques are compared with other previous methods. Remeshing objectives are described by angle range control, feature preservation, error control, valence optimization, and remeshing compatibility. The metrics used in the literature for the evaluation of surface remeshing algorithms are discussed. Meshing techniques are compared with other related methods via a comprehensive table with indices of the method name, the remeshing challenge met and solved, the category the method belongs to, and the year of publication. We expect this survey to be a practical reference for surface remeshing in terms of literature classification, method analysis, and future prospects.

Differentiable Surface Triangulation

“…Surface remeshing and triangle mesh optimization are both extremely well-studied problems in computational geometry, computer graphics, and related fields. Below we review methods most closely related to ours, and refer to recent surveys, including Cheng et al 2016;Khan et al 2020;Khatamian and Arabnia 2016] for a more in-depth discussion.…”

A simple history dependent remeshing technique to increase finite element model stability in elastic surface deformations

“…The quality of a given element is often quantified using the element aspect ratio given by A = 2r i /r o . Here r i and r o describe the radii of the inscribed and circumscribed circles, respectively [31]. Note that there are several different definitions of the aspect ratio of a triangle, though all have a similar meaning.…”

HexDom: Polycube-Based Hexahedral-Dominant Mesh Generation

“…In finite element analysis (FEA), a 3D domain can be discretized into tetrahedral or hexahedral (hex) meshes. For tetrahedral mesh generation, various strategies have been proposed in the literature [54,15,19,33], such as octree-based [38,56], delaunay triangulation [4], and advancing front methods [8,23,37]. Because tetra-hedral meshes can be created automatically, it has been widely used in industry.…”