In the last decade the processing of polygonal meshes has
emerged as an active and very productive research area. This
can basically be attributed to two developments:
Modern geometry acquisition devices, like laser scanners
and MRT, easily produce raw polygonal meshes of
ever growing complexity
Downstream applications like analysis tools (medical
imaging), computer aided manufacturing, or numerical
simulations all require high quality polygonal meshes
as input.
The need to bridge the gap between raw triangle soup data
and high-quality polygon meshes has driven the research on
ecient data structures and algorithms that directly operate
on polygonal meshes rather than on a (most often not
feasible) intermediate CAD representation.
