Curvature estimation for meshes based on vertex normal triangles

The estimation of surface curvature is essential for a variety of applications in computer graphics because of its invariance with respect to rigid transformations. In this article, we describe a curvature estimation method for meshes by converting each planar triangular facet into a curved patch using the vertex positions and the normals of three vertices of each triangle. Our method interpolates three end points and the corresponding normal vectors of each triangle to construct a curved patch. Then, we compute the per triangle curvature of the neighboring triangles of a mesh point of interest. Similar to estimating per vertex normal from the adjacent per triangle normal, we compute the per vertex curvature by taking a weighted average of per triangle curvature. Through some examples, we demonstrate that our method is efficient and its accuracy is comparable to that of the existing methods.

► We interpolate three end points and corresponding normal vectors of each triangle to construct a curved patch.
► With the curved patches, we estimate the curvatures based on the shape operator.
► We demonstrate that our method is efficient in both space and time by the synthetic models and the discrete meshes.