Features MeshLab is a pivotal tool in a variety of contexts

In the pipeline of processing 3D scanned data the aligment step, (also known as referencing), is a fundamental one. Most acquisition devices generate sequences of range maps, each one of them is usually defined in its own reference system. MeshLab provides various tools for briging these maps in a common reference system.

Even if a precise, detailed geometry is essential for the study and documentation of a CH artifact, lots of information also comes from the color and appearance data. Since a complete reconstruction of the optical properties of an artifact is still hard to achieve, what is normally done is to rely on color data coming from photographic dataset. MeshLab offers state of the art tools for the generation and processing of color information on a high resolution 3D model. This paper shows the basic operations available and present actual projects were this tools have been successfully used. The first step in the color management, is to align photos to the 3D model, this operation is possible in MeshLab in a short time by using a very simple interface. The photos aligned in this way may be spatially-explored directly in the 3D space, instead of browsing a folder on the disk, looking at the photos like see-through transparencies suspended in space or projected onto the surface. An interesting possibility is to use also unconventional photos, like photos with annotations, historical photos or even near-visible lighting photos (ultraviolet, multispectral, infrared, thermography….) The spatial exploration of the georeferenced photographic set is a powerful tool but, in many applications, it is needed to have the color information mapped onto the geometry. To this aim, MeshLab offers different color mapping tools to better cope with the different needs of the various datasets. By using the color data from the calibrated images, it is possible to generate detailed, artifact free per-vertex color encoding, fill an existing texture parametrization or generate an entirely new texture mapping, driven by the photographic coverage. The reconstruction of a faithful representation of the actual color of an artifact is often just a first step towards the understanding of the original aspect of the object. Almost always, the current state of an archeological find is degraded: to propose possible reconstruction of the original color of the object is a normal activity for archeologists or art historian. This task, however, is generally carried out on photos or drawings of the artifact, while it would be possible to do it directly on the 3D surface. The Surface Painting tools provided by MeshLab may be used to color the 3D surface using painting-like interface. By using this editing tool, it was possible to produce such proposed color reconstructions, directly on the 3D geometry. MeshLab is the most complete open source software for the creation and manipulation od high resolution 3D models of real-world objects, and the availability of such color management tools is an important instrument for the archeological and CH communityTab 1 content

text text Donec id elit non mi porta gravida at eget metus. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Donec sed odio dui

text text Donec id elit non mi porta gravida at eget metus. Fusce dapibus, tellus ac cursus commodo, tortor mauris condimentum nibh, ut fermentum massa justo sit amet risus. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod. Donec sed odio dui

Tab 1 content

Tab 1 content

Tab 1 content

Download

About

MeshLab is an open source interactive mesh processing system. It is a multiplatform software distributed under GPL.

Project Leader: Paolo Cignoni

Core Developer and Manager: Guido Ranzuglia

Copyright: Visual Computing Lab, CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy

History

References

• Generic Citation:
  "MeshLab: an Open-Source Mesh Processing Tool" P. Cignoni, M. Callieri, M. Corsini, M. Dellepiane, F. Ganovelli, G. Ranzuglia
  Sixth Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference, ISBN 978-3-905673-68-5, page 129-136 - 2008

  @inproceedings{cignoni2008meshlab,
    title={Meshlab: an open-source mesh processing tool},
    author={Cignoni, P. and Callieri, M. and Corsini, M. and Dellepiane, M. and Ganovelli, F. and Ranzuglia, G.},
    booktitle={Eurographics Italian Chapter Conference},
    pages={129--136},
    year={2008},
    ISBN={978-3-905673-68-5},
    organization={The Eurographics Association},
    url={http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2008/CCCDGR08}
  }
  

• When using MeshLab for processing architectural 3D scanned data:
  Processing a Complex Architectural Sampling with MeshLab: the case of Piazza Della Signoria
  M. Callieri, P. Cignoni, M. Dellepiane, G. Ranzuglia, R. Scopigno
  Proc. of 3D-ARCH 2011 - 4th Int. Workshop on 3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures (Trento, 2-5 March 2011),

  @InProceedings\{CCDRS11,
    author       = "Callieri, Marco and Cignoni, Paolo and Dellepiane, Matteo and Ranzuglia, Guido and Scopigno, Roberto",
    title        = "Processing a Complex Architectural Sampling with MeshLab: the case of Piazza Della Signoria",
    booktitle    = "Proc. of 3D-ARCH 2011 - 4th Int. Workshop on 3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures (Trento, 2-5 March 2011)",
    volume       = "vol. XXXVIII-5/W16",
    pages        = "art. 29",
    year         = "2011",
    editor       = "Fabio Remondino, Sabry El-Hakim ",
    publisher    = "International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing",
    url          = "http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2011/CCDRS11"
  }
  

• When using MeshLab for texture/color management in 3D scanning:
  "MeshLab as a complete tool for the integration of photos and color with high resolution 3D geometry data ",
  G. Ranzuglia, M. Callieri, M. Dellepiane, P. Cignoni, R. Scopigno
  CAA 2012 Conference Proceeding - 2012

  @inproceedings{RCDCS12,
    author       = "Ranzuglia, Guido and Callieri, Marco and Dellepiane, Matteo and Cignoni, Paolo and Scopigno, Roberto",
    title        = "MeshLab as a complete tool for the integration of photos and color with high resolution 3D geometry data",
    booktitle    = "CAA 2012 Conference Proceeding",
    year         = "2012",
    publisher    = "Pallas Publications - Amsterdam University Press (AUP)",
    url          = "http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2012/RCDCS12"
  }
  }
  

License

MeshLab uses some third party open source libraries for its working. Here is the complete lists of the projects that we gratefully thanks for their kind liberality. MeshLab is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• VCG Library, developed at the Visual Computing Group - ISTI - CNR. Responsible for all the mesh processing and rendering tasks. (GPL)
• QT, TrollTech the standard framework for high performance, cross-platform application development.
• GLEW: The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library (BSD)
• lib3ds a software library for managing 3D-Studio Release 3 and 4 ".3DS" files. (LGPL)
• bzip2 a freely available, patent free, high-quality data compressor. (BSD)
• Universal 3D Sample Software Set of libraries to write, read, extend, render and interact with U3D-formatted data, as defined by standard ECMA-363. This library is not directly linked but the U3D plugin invokes the idtfcoverted executable, whose sources are provided with the examples of the library. A binary of the idtfconverter is directly provided with the MeshLab distribution.
• Poisson Surface reconstrution, heavily based on the code kindly provided by Michael Kazhdan and Matthew Bolitho (custom license thanks Misha and Matthew!)
• movie15 Latex package a LaTeX style to embed movies, sounds and 3D objects into PDF documents; the needed glue to generating pdf with embedded U3D objects.
• Some of the icons of the editing tools came from the Tango Icon Library projects.

Privacy Disclaimer

MeshLab will automatically check for the availability of updated versions and will notify the need of upgrading the software to the users. For this reason, from time to time, MeshLab will issue a http network connection. If you prefer that MeshLab does not communicate in any way with its developers, simply use a plain firewall and prevent any MeshLab access to the network. This will not limit in any way the normal behavior of MeshLab (apart from getting notified of new MeshLab releases) Moreover, when using MeshLab, it locally collects some aggregated statistical data about only the specific usage of MeshLab: the overall number and averaged size of the opened/saved meshes; nothing more. Periodically this information is sent back to the developers. This data will be used for statistical analysis and for the assessment of the MeshLab usage.

We would like to remark that the kind of information collected by MeshLab is probably by far less sensitive than the information that is silently collected by most web sites when you surf them: IP address, visited pages, frequency of return. We would also like to stress that we really need this information in order to assess how diffusely MeshLab is used and what is its impact on the 3D community.

Acknowledgments

Some of the MeshLab developers got financial support for their work. For the Italian CNR employees (and for the other involved partners) we acknowledge that MeshLab has received the financial support of the following projects:

• 3D-CoForm (EU IST): "The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n. 231809"
• EPOCH EU Network of Excellence, IST-2002-507382, 2004-2008
• BLU-ARCHEOSYS, MIUR Project, 2006-2009
• V-Must.Net Virtual Museum Transnational Network, EC 7thFW NoE - no. 270404, 2011-2015
• Ariadne Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe EC INFRA-2012-1.1.3, 2012-2016

Help and support