Abstract
This paper deals with the comparison of the normal vector field of a smooth surface S with the normal vector field of another surface differentiable almost everywhere. The main result gives an upper bound on angles between the normals of S and the normals of a triangulation T close to S. This upper bound is expressed in terms of the geometry of T, the curvature of S and the Hausdorff distance between both surfaces. This kind of result is really useful: in particular, results of the approximation of the normal vector field of a smooth surface S can induce results of the approximation of the area; indeed, in a very general case (T is only supposed to be locally the graph of a lipschitz function), if we know the angle between the normals of both surfaces, then we can explicitly express the area of S in terms of geometrical invariants of T, the curvature of S and of the Hausdorff distance between both surfaces. We also apply our results in surface reconstruction: we obtain convergence results when T is the restricted Delaunay triangulation of an ε-sample of S; using Chew’s algorithm, we also build sequences of triangulations inscribed in S whose curvature measures tend to the curvatures measures of S.
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Morvan, JM., Thibert, B. Approximation of the Normal Vector Field and the Area of a Smooth Surface. Discrete Comput Geom 32, 383–400 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-004-1096-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-004-1096-4