Curvature measurement of 3D objects: evaluation and comparison of three methods

Many computer vision techniques (e.g., object recognition) use curvature as an image feature. Arbitrary, discrete, 3D surfaces are often encountered, for instance, in medical images (MRI is used as a particular example), but relatively few methods for estimating the curvature of these 3D surfaces have been proposed. Three such methods (the surface triangulation, cross patch, and partial derivative techniques) are described. These methods are used to locate curvature extrema (corners) in 3D images. The suitability of the methods for this application is evaluated and compared.