Reach for the Arcs: Reconstructing Surfaces from SDFs via Tangent Points

Silvia Sellán, Yingying Ren, Christopher Batty, Oded Stein

Abstract: We introduce an algorithm to reconstruct a mesh from discrete samples of a shape’s Signed Distance Function (SDF). A simple geometric reinterpretation of the SDF lets us formulate the problem through a point cloud, from which a surface can be extracted with existing techniques. We extract all possible information from the SDF data, outperforming commonly used algorithms and imposing no topological or geometric restrictions.