Implicit Surfaces with Globally Regularised and Compactly Supported Basis Functions

Christian Walder, Olivier Chapelle, Bernhard Schölkopf

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 (NIPS 2006)

We consider the problem of constructing a function whose zero set is to represent a surface, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable properties previously only associated with fully supported bases, and show equivalence to a Gaussian process with modified covariance function. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data.