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rasterize

For the point cloud representation, how is the granularity of given points decided ? Because, it might be difficult to visualize or make new surfaces, if we end up sampling very less number of points.

pkukreja

In that case, it would lead to aliasing

keenan

@rasterize That's actually a tough question! It depends very much on how much you can say about your point sampling. If you have a really "nice" sampling, things get easier; if you have a totally random and unpredictable sampling, it's pretty hard. A "nice" sampling might mean something like: the biggest distance between any point and its closest neighbor is no more than some fixed constant $\alpha$, AND the smallest distance between any point and its closest neighbor is no less than some fixed constant $\beta$. This way you know that samples are evenly spread out, and can more easily downsample/upsample according to the current screen resolution (e.g., how big is the size of a projected pixel relative to $alpha$ and $beta$?).

You can make this sampling even nicer by asking for a so-called "blue noise" property, which says, roughly speaking, that if you do a Fourier transform of the points (for now pushing under the rug exactly what this means...) you have very close to a uniform distribution of power in the frequency domain. This is the kind of point sampling that is also nice for, say, stippling images.