1st Reading December 15, 2006 14:40 WSPC/164-IJIG 00261 International Journal of Image and Graphics 1 Vol. 7, No. 1 (2007) 1–18 c  World Scientific Publishing Company 3 AN APPROACH TO SURFACE RECONSTRUCTION USING UNCERTAIN DATA 5 LAURA PAPALEO Department of Informatics and Computer Science, 7 University of Genova Via Dodecaneso, 35, Genova, Italy 16133 9 papaleo@disi.unige.it Received 5 May 2006 11 Revised 20 September 2006 Accepted 26 September 2006 13 In a research context in which multiple and well-behaved Surface Reconstruction algo- rithms already exist, the main goal is not to implement a visualization toolkit able render 15 complex object, but the implementation of methods which can improve our knowledge on the observed world. This work presents a general Surface Reconstruction framework 17 which encapsulates the uncertainty of the sampled data, making no assumption on the shape of the surface to be reconstructed. Starting from the input points (either points 19 clouds or multiple range images), an Estimated Existence Function (EEF) is built which models the space in which the desired surface could exist and, by the extraction of EEF 21 critical points, the surface is reconstructed. The final goal is the development of a generic framework that is able to adapt the result to different kinds of additional information 23 coming that is from multiple sensors. Keywords : Surface reconstruction; multi-sensor data fusion; uncertain data; shape 25 modeling 1. Introduction 27 A burst of research has been made during the last decade on 3D Reconstruction and several well-behave algorithms have been developed. However, as scanning tech- 29 nologies improve their performance, reconstruction methods have to tackle new problems such as working with datasets of large dimension and building meshes 31 almost in real-time. Actually there exists a general need for formal analysis of the reconstruction problem and for methods which are able to elaborate huge and 33 complex input datasets and to produce accurate results, to exploit all information provided by sensing devices, and to transmit models quickly and accurately in order 35 to visualize, search, and modify them using different devices (PDA, laptop, special devices, and so on). Among the main applications there is, doubtless, the medical 37 one. In general, a key problem in medical computation is reconstruction of shapes (of organs, bones, tumors etc) from lower dimensional information such as CAT 39 1