Modeling the rim appearance

A viewer-centered approach is presented to modeling the geometry of the visible occluding contour of solid 3-D shape. The rim appearance representation models the exact appearance of the occluding contour formed by the edges of a polyhedron. An algorithm is presented for constructing the rim appearance representation. Bounds on space and time are given, and implementation results show that the rim appearance representation is significantly smaller than both the aspect graph and the asp representation.<<ETX>>