Estimating Curvatures and Their Derivatives on Triangle Meshes

Report ID: TR-693-04
Author: Rusinkiewicz, Szymon
Date: 2004-03-00
Pages: 4
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Abstract:

The computation of curvature and other differential properties of surfaces is essential for many techniques in analysis and rendering. We present a finite-differences approach for estimating curvatures on irregular triangle meshes that may be thought of as an extension of a common method for estimating per-vertex normals. The technique is stable and robust, offers accuracy comparable to or better than existing methods, and generalizes naturally to computing derivatives of curvature and higher-order surface differentials.