The **_Visualization and Computer Graphics Library_** (VCGlib for short) is a open source, portable, C++, templated, no dependency, library for manipulation, processing, cleaning, simplifying triangle meshes.

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The library, composed by more than 100k lines of code, is released under the GPL license, and it is the base of most of the software tools of the [Visual Computing Lab](http://vcg.isti.cnr.it) of the Italian National Research Council Institute ISTI , like MeshLab, metro and many others.

The VCG library is tailored to mostly manage triangular meshes: The library is fairly large and offers many state of the art functionalities for processing meshes, like:

- high quality quadric-error edge-collapse based simplfication,
- efficient spatial query structures (uniform grids, hashed grids, kdtree, ...) ,
- advanced smoothing and fairing algorithms,
- computation of curvature,
- optimization of texture coordinates,
- Hausdorff distance computation,
- geodesic paths,
- mesh repairing capabilities,
- isosurface extraction and advancing front meshing algorithms,
- Poisson Disk sampling and other tools to sample point distributions over meshes,
- subdivision surfaces

## Notable Applications

A number of applications have been developed using the vcglib:

- MeshLab: the renowed open source mesh processing is based on this library.
- Metro, the tool for measuring differences between meshes
- The first high quality out-of-core mesh simplifier that was used by the Stanford Digital Michelangelo project to process their huge 3D scanned models.

## Contacts

For any info about licensing (portion of) the library please contact us:
Paolo Cignoni (p.cignoni@isti.cnr.it) 
Visual Computing Lab of the Italian National Research Council - ISTI

In case of bugs please report them [here](https://github.com/cnr-isti-vclab/vcglib/issues) .