An Image Processing Approach to Detection of Ridges and Ravines on Polygonal Surfaces
Alexander G. Belyaev, Yutaka Ohtake · Eurographics · 2000
Surface creases, ridges and ravines, provide us with important information about the shapes of 3D objects and can be intuitively defined as curves on a surface along which the surface bends sharply. Exploring similarity between edges of 2D grey-scale images and curvature extrema of 3D shapes and generalizing a basic edge detection approach to triangular meshes, we develop a method for detection of ridges and ravines on a smooth surface approximated by a triangular mesh. We also sketch three potential applications of our approach: mesh fairness evaluation, improving mesh decimation techniques, and simulating artistic pen-and-ink drawings of 3D objects.