The main contribution of the paper is to describe a new class of the adaptive mesh. The mesh uses both split and merge operations to adapt itself to the structure of volumetric data-points. The adaptive behaviour is controlled by the variance of the data-point positions about maximum-likelihood quadric patches. The authors show that the density of control points on the mesh is regulated by the curvature of the underlying surface. Finally, they illustrate the effectiveness of the method on both real-world and simulated data-sets.