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.