Controlled and adaptive mesh zippering

Merging meshes is a recurrent need in geometry modeling and it is a critical step in the 3D acquisition pipeline, where it is used for building a single mesh from several range scans. A pioneering simple and effective solution to merging is represented by the Zippering algorithm (Turk and Levoy, 1994), which consists of simply stitching the meshes together along their borders. In this paper we propose a new extended version of the zippering algorithm that enables the user to control the resulting mesh by introducing quality criteria in the selection of redundant data, and allows to zip together meshes with different granularity by an ad hoc refinement algorithm.