Self-intersection removal in triangular mesh offsetting

Abstract

Proposed in this paper is an efficient algorithm to remove self-intersections from the raw offset triangular mesh. The resulting regular mesh can be used in shape inflation, tool path generation, and process planning to name a few. Objective is to find the valid region - set of triangles defining the outer boundary of the offset volume from the raw offset triangular mesh. Starting with a seed triangle, the algorithm grows the valid region to neighboring triangles until it reaches triangles with self-intersection. Then the region growing process crosses over the self-intersection and moves to the adjacent valid triangle. Therefore the region growing traverses valid triangles and intersecting triangles adjacent to valid triangles only. This property makes the algorithm efficient and robust, since this method omits unnecessary traversing invalid region, which usually has very complex geometric shape and contains many meaningless self-intersections.