Morphological decomposition of natural surfaces (Invited Paper)

The main goal of surface characterization addresses the reduction of a surface to a compact symbolic description that efficiently stores information about the morphological structure of the surface. In the context of polyhedral surfaces characteristic regions, i.e., regions with convex, concave, planar, and saddle shape, are proposed as structural surface components and are defined taking into account geometric relationships between triangles. Based on these areal features, a symbolic representation of the surface called characteristic region configuration graph is produced where the nodes correspond to the surface regions while the arcs and hyperarcs correspond to the surface characteristic lines and points.