Curvature estimation scheme for triangle meshes using biquadratic Bézier patches

When dealing with triangle meshes, it is often important to compute curvature information for the purposes of feature recognition, segmentation, or shape analysis. Since a triangle mesh is a piecewise linear surface, curvature has to be estimated. Several different schemes have been proposed, both discrete and continuous, i.e. based on fitting surfaces locally. This paper compares commonly used discrete and continuous curvature estimation schemes. We also present a novel method which uses biquadratic Bézier patches as a local surface fitting technique.