Approximation Bounds for Interpolation and Normals on Triangulated Surfaces and Manifolds
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How good is a triangulation as an approximation of a smooth curved surface or manifold? We provide bounds on the interpolation error, the error in the position of the surface, and the normal error, the error in the normal vectors of the surface, as approximated by a piecewise linearly triangulated surface whose vertices lie on the original, smooth surface. The interpolation error is the distance from an arbitrary point on the triangulation to the nearest point on the original, smooth manifold, or vice versa. The normal error is the angle separating the vector (or space) normal to a triangle from the vector (or space) normal to the smooth manifold (measured at a suitable point near the triangle). We also study the normal variation, the angle separating the normal vectors (or normal spaces) at two different points on a smooth manifold. Our bounds apply to manifolds of any dimension embedded in Euclidean spaces of any dimension, and our interpolation error bounds apply to simplices of any dimension, although our normal error bounds apply only to triangles. These bounds are expressed in terms of the sizes of suitable medial balls (the empty ball size or local feature size measured at certain points on the manifold), and have applications in Delaunay triangulation-based algorithms for provably good surface reconstruction and provably good mesh generation. Our bounds have better constants than the prior bounds we know of—and for several results in higher dimensions, our bounds are the first to give explicit constants.
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