Segmentation and surface characterization of arbitrary 3D meshes for object reconstruction and recognition

Polygonal models are the most common representation of structured 3D data in computer graphics, pattern recognition and machine vision. The method presented here automatically identifies and labels all compact surface regions of a polygonal mesh, visible or not, and extracts valuable invariant features regarding their geometric attributes. A method that is independent of the mesh topology is also presented for the surface bumpiness estimation and the identification of coarse surface regions.