Complexity of the delaunay triangulation of points on surfaces the smooth case

It is well known that the complexity of the Delaunay triangulation of N points in R 3, i.e. the number of its faces, can be O (N2). The case of points distributed on a surface is of great practical importance in reverse engineering since most surface reconstruction algorithms first construct the Delaunay triangulation of a set of points measured on a surface.In this paper, we bound the complexity of the Delaunay triangulation of points distributed on generic smooth surfaces of R 3. Under a mild uniform sampling condition, we show that the complexity of the 3D Delaunay triangulation of the points is O(N log N).