A fast narrow band method and its application in topology-adaptive 3D modeling

We present a new fast method of modeling 3D objects of arbitrary topology. The level set methods have been used by many researchers to recover 3D shapes of arbitrary topology. However, those methods are computationally inefficient. To reduce the computational cost a new method, named fast narrow band (FNB) method, is proposed. FNB is based on the narrow band method (NB) which is the well-known fast method of the level set method. The main idea is to exploit the combined use of the narrow band and the approximate distance from the front. The method was applied in several experiments using range data and we found that our method was over 50 times faster than NB.