Laplacian smoothing is an algorithm to smooth a polygonal mesh. For each vertex in a mesh, a new position is chosen based on local information (such as the position of neighbors) and the vertex is moved there. In the case that a mesh is topologically a rectangular grid (that is, each internal vertex is connected to four neighbors) then this operation produces the Laplacian of the mesh.
More formally, the smoothing operation may be described per-vertex as:
Where