Abstract.
The performance of several methods for estimating local surface geometry (the principal frame plus the principal quadric) are examined by applying them to a suite of synthetic and real test data which have been corrupted by various amounts of additive Gaussian noise. Methods considered include finite differences, a facet based approach, and quadric surface fitting. The nonlinear quadric fitting method considered was found to perform the best but has the greatest computational cost. The facet based approach works as well as the other quadric fitting methods and has a much smaller computational cost. Hence it is the recommended method to use in practice.
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McIvor, A., Valkenburg, R. A comparison of local surface geometry estimation methods. Machine Vision and Applications 10, 17–26 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/s001380050055
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s001380050055