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Abstract
3D-laser scanners become more and more popular especially for measuring construction sites, in the
field of architecture and for preservation of monuments. As these scanners can only record discrete
data sets (point clouds), it is neccessary to mesh these sets for getting closed 3D-models and take
advantage of 3D-graphics acceleration of modern graphics hardware. The meshing process is a
complex issue and in the last years there were lots of algorithms developed to solve this problem.
In this work a continuous Level-of-Detail (LOD) algorithm will be presented, from which a
simplified 3D-surface model can be created, which uses only as much triangles as needed. The
amount of simplification is determined by the user through an error tolerance similar to the
Hausdorff-Distance. This algorithm is not a dynamic (view-dependent) LOD-mesh simplification,
but an intelligent (non-redundant) approximation of point clouds. It is a simple and extendable
meshing algorithm, which is made up of a mixture of some techniques adapted from popular
Terrain-LOD algorithms. The algorithm has been implemented in an OpenGL based 3D-point cloud
editing tool called PointMesh, which is also presented here.
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