the principle of distance calculation of point cloud to mesh

[minty688]

I can't understand your algorithm that how to use the fast winding number to calculate the distance from the point cloud to the mesh, (I am not very familiar with the C++ , I can only understand the calculation process of calculating the winding number in Gavin's paper)

can you briefly describe the principle of distance calculation or recommand some paper to explain it.Thank you

[fwilliams]

There are two parts to this. The first uses an AABB tree to find the nearest point on a mesh for each query point (find the closest triangle and then which position on that triangle is the closest point). The result of this step is an unsigned distance for each point on the mesh. To sign the distance (determine if it's inside or outside), the algorithm uses fast winding numbers which is described in the linked paper.