Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ling, Selena, Madan, Abhishek, Sharp, Nicholas, Jacobson, Alec
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ling, Selena
Madan, Abhishek
Sharp, Nicholas
Jacobson, Alec
author_facet Ling, Selena
Madan, Abhishek
Sharp, Nicholas
Jacobson, Alec
contents Randomly sampling points on surfaces is an essential operation in geometry processing. This sampling is computationally straightforward on explicit meshes, but it is much more difficult on other shape representations, such as widely-used implicit surfaces. This work studies a simple and general scheme for sampling points on a surface, which is derived from a connection to the intersections of random rays with the surface. Concretely, given a subroutine to cast a ray against a surface and find all intersections, we can use that subroutine to uniformly sample white noise points on the surface. This approach is particularly effective in the context of implicit signed distance functions, where sphere marching allows us to efficiently cast rays and sample points, without needing to extract an intermediate mesh. We analyze the basic method to show that it guarantees uniformity, and find experimentally that it is significantly more efficient than alternative strategies on a variety of representations. Furthermore, we show extensions to blue noise sampling and stratified sampling, and applications to deform neural implicit surfaces as well as moment estimation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays
Ling, Selena
Madan, Abhishek
Sharp, Nicholas
Jacobson, Alec
Graphics
Randomly sampling points on surfaces is an essential operation in geometry processing. This sampling is computationally straightforward on explicit meshes, but it is much more difficult on other shape representations, such as widely-used implicit surfaces. This work studies a simple and general scheme for sampling points on a surface, which is derived from a connection to the intersections of random rays with the surface. Concretely, given a subroutine to cast a ray against a surface and find all intersections, we can use that subroutine to uniformly sample white noise points on the surface. This approach is particularly effective in the context of implicit signed distance functions, where sphere marching allows us to efficiently cast rays and sample points, without needing to extract an intermediate mesh. We analyze the basic method to show that it guarantees uniformity, and find experimentally that it is significantly more efficient than alternative strategies on a variety of representations. Furthermore, we show extensions to blue noise sampling and stratified sampling, and applications to deform neural implicit surfaces as well as moment estimation.
title Uniform Sampling of Surfaces by Casting Rays
topic Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05268