Generating a 3D Mesh from a point cloud using Self Organising Maps

My latest project is investigating if it is possible to generate a mesh of a 3d surface using artificial neural networks.  The surface is to be defined as a 3D point cloud and the mesh is to accurately represent it.

I have an interest in artificial neural networks (ANNs) and their applications and this project gives me the chance to look at self organising maps (SOMs) in greater detail.  My previous work has generally been based on multi layer feed forward perceptrons, so this gives me the opportunity to look at a different field of ANNs.

Mesh generation seems to be a problem that a few of the main CAD systems are trying to solve at the moment and so rather than using mathematical and analytical methods, I aim to evaluate the suitability of biologically inspired AI for this task.

An example mesh for half a sphere:

Paul