Smooth Feature Lines on Surface Meshes

Abstract

Feature lines are salient surface characteristics. Their definition involves third and fourth order surface derivatives. This often yields to unpleasantly rough and squiggly feature lines since third order derivatives are highly sensitive against unwanted surface noise. The present work proposes two novel concepts for a more stable algorithm producing visually more pleasing feature lines: First, a new computation scheme based on discrete differential geometry is presented, avoiding costly computations of higher order approximating surfaces. Secondly, this scheme is augmented by a filtering method for higher order surface derivatives to improve both the stability of the extraction of feature lines and the smoothness of their appearance.