Charting Surface Structure

Peter T. Sander, Steven W. Zucker

Abstract: Computing surface curvature would seem to be a simple application of differential geometry, but problems arise due to noise and the quantized nature of digital images. We present a method for determining principal curvatures and directions of surfaces estimated from three-dimensional images. We use smoothness constraints to connect different surface points and by then comparing information over local neighbourhoods we iteratively update the information at each point to ensure that this information is consistent over the estimated surface.