Estimating the tensor of curvature of a surface from a polyhedral approximation

  • Authors:
  • G. Taubin

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ICCV '95 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer Vision
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

Estimating principal curvatures and principal directions of a surface from a polyhedral approximation with a large number of small faces, such as those produced by iso-surface construction algorithms, has become a basic step in many computer vision algorithms, particularly in those targeted at medical applications. We describe a method to estimate the tensor of curvature of a surface at the vertices of a polyhedral approximation. Principal curvatures and principal directions are obtained by computing in closed form the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of certain 3/spl times/3 symmetric matrices defined by integral formulas, and closely related to the matrix representation of the tensor of curvature. The resulting algorithm is linear, both in time and in space, as a function of the number of vertices and faces of the polyhedral surface.