Tuesday, June 2, 2009

MeshLab V1.2.1 Released!


Initially this release was planned just as a bug fixing release (a really needed one!): a couple of really annoying bugs infiltrated the 1.2.0 release, causing crashes for all the tools that involved a marching cube processing and malfunctioning of the U3D exporting. Now they should work well.

In practice it is a feature rich release: as a bonus we have added some new nice functionalities (thanks to M. Sottile for implementing them): Convex Hull, Alpha shape, Voronoi Filtering, and Visible points filters. These filters rely on the well known Qhull convex hull library.
Convex hulls and Alpha shapes do not need extensive introduction, but a few notes on the two other filters are probably needed.

Voronoi filtering implements the homonym surface reconstruction algorithm by Nina Amenta and Marshall Bern that is able to reconstruct a nice interpolating triangulated mesh from a point clouds. It requires nicely sampled, low noise point clouds, but it works well.

The Visible Points filter implements a nice algorithm of Sagi Katz, Ayellet Talfor and Ronen Basri for computing direct visibility of point clouds. It is a really really simple and smart trick that works well and it is really easy to be implemented (once you have a convex hull implementation).

As usual, release notes are here in the wiki.