Surface area estimation for digitized regular solids

The problem of multigrid convergent surface area measurement came with the advent of computer-based image analysis. The paper proposes a classification scheme of local and global polyhedrization approaches which allows us to classify different surface area measurement techniques with respect to the underlying polyhedrization scheme. It is shown that a local polyhedrization technique such as marching cubes is not multigrid convergent towards the true value even for elementary convex regular solids such as cubes, spheres or cylinders. The paper summarizes work on global polyhedrization techniques with experimental results pointing towards correct multigrid convergence. The class of general ellipsoids is suggested to be a test set for such multigrid convergence studies.