Rational spherical splines for genus zero shape modeling

Traditional approaches for modeling a closed manifold surface with either regular tensor-product or triangular splines (defined over an open planar domain) require decomposing the acquired geometric data into a group of charts, mapping each chart to a planar parametric domain, fitting an open surface patch of certain degree to each chart, and finally, trimming the patches (if necessary) and stitching all of them together to form a closed manifold. In this paper, we develop a novel modeling method which does not need any cutting or patching operations for genus zero surfaces. Our new approach is founded upon the concept of spherical splines proposed by Pfeifle and Seidel. Our work is strongly inspired by the fact that, for genus zero surfaces, it is both intuitive and necessary to employ spheres as their natural domains. Using this framework, we can convert genus zero mesh to a single rational spherical spline whose maximal error deviated from the original data is less than a user-specified tolerance. With the rational spherical splines, we can model sharp features and edit both the global shape and the local details with ease. Furthermore, we can accurately compute the differential quantities without resorting to any numerical approximations. We conduct several experiments in order to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for reverse engineering, shape modeling, and interactive graphics.