To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation ...

able to generate a watertight surface. Run length encoding and resampling of the rangeimages are implemented to achieve space and time efficiency.Instead of computing the signed distance along the measurement direction [21],Hilton et al. [36] constructs the implicit surface using the true distance between thevoxel and the surface. Because this approach is not based on back projection, the holescannot be filled. Three techniques for nearest point computation are discussed. Theintegrated surface is extracted using the marching triangle algorithm [37].Implicit surface-based algorithms are robust to surface sampling noise and registrationerror. The quality of the extracted surface mesh is guaranteed. To have an accuratereconstruction, a high resolution of the volumetric grid takes a large amount of memory.A variation of the mesh integration-based algorithm is implemented in this research[85], which is similar to [66]. The implicit surface-based algorithm used in this research isa combination of [21] and [36], which computes the true signed distance field and is ableto generate watertight surfaces [89]. Beside the geometric fusion, texture integration isintroduced into both methods.2.4 Surface SegmentationSubdividing an image into its constituent parts or objects, segmentation is usually thefirst step in image analysis. Autonomous segmentation is one of the most difficult tasksin image processing [32].In this research, the interest is in segmenting arbitrary surfaces represented by a28