Removing the Water Tight-ness property from the mesh constructed by poisson reconstruction using Point Cloud Library

Question

I would like to generate visually appealing surface reconstruction from the the point clouds.

I am using point cloud library. I tried creating a mesh using poisson reconstruction method but later found that it gives a water tight reconstruction.

For example: In my case I have a point cloud of a room

Using the code at http://justpaste.it/code1 , I was able to get a reconstruction like this

_{(source: pcl-users.org)}

The above picture has the surface which is covering the top view. This was visualized using MeshLab. Then later on the MeshLab GUI when I press points, it looks like this.
_{(source: pcl-users.org)}

But in the second picture there are points on its surface too(Not clearly visible in the attached picture).

Can you help in creating a model that has no points on the top and just has the inside structure ?

Any other suggestions to improve the reconstruction quality ?

The point cloud of the room and generated ply file can be downloaded from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/95042389/temp_pcd_ply_files.tar.bz2

Answer 1

One solution that works for me is obtaining a convex/concave hull of your point cloud. Then you can use this hull to filter/crop your mesh after Poisson reconstruction. If you use the PCL you can try ConvexHull or ConcaveHull together with CropHull and test the results. Hope this solves your issue, it did for me.

Answer 2

As far as my experience is concerned (meshing caves), meshing with Poisson will result in watertight model/mesh, which is why your model was covered entirely. I only deal with meshes using MeshLab but I am guessing it is the same thing. What I did try is using Ball-Pivoting meshing algorithm in MeshLab which result in non-watertight model. Maybe that is what you are looking for.