Generating a smooth voxel-based model from an irregular polygon mesh

A method for generating a smooth voxelbased model from an arbitrary polygon mesh is presented. It is based on a polygonal subdivision process which takes an irregular polygon mesh as input and creates a finer and smoother mesh. The mesh is recursively refined down to or close to the voxel level, and then voxelized (digitized) into a voxel-based representation. A local subdivision approach has been developed in order to ease the computationally expensive subdivision process. The voxelization of the mesh maintains topological and fidelity requirements which are pre-defined and application dependent.