Texture-Driven Adaptive Mesh Refinement with Application to 3D Relief

A high-quality 3D relief requires an appropriate refinement that has accurate carving boundaries with a limited number of added polygons. Most existing refinement methods cannot be applied to 3D reliefs directly, as they exhibit a mixture of problems such as not accurately following the texture contours, creating ill-shaped triangles, and excessively increasing the polygon count. We introduce an efficient texture-driven method to adaptively refine a mesh for 3D reliefs. From the user-provided binary texture, we conduct a feature-preserving self-adaptive sampling of texture contours. Our other inputs are a 3D mesh and the mapping of that mesh to texture space. We adapt a constraint-driven Red–Green subdivision to locally subdivide the mesh around the contours. Then, we conduct the adaptive mesh refinement by introducing a feature-adaptive $\sqrt{3}$-subdivision. Finally, we apply the proposed algorithm to 3D reliefs, which enables generating a distinct relief. The presented method can attain accurate 3D relief while maintaining good mesh quality without the necessity of a high-resolution input. When compared to alternative approaches, ours consistently demonstrates superior polygon quality and maintains relief boundaries that closely follow the texture contours.