Fast, robust, and faithful methods for detecting crest lines on meshes

The crest lines, salient subsets of the extrema of the principal curvatures over their corresponding curvature lines, are powerful shape descriptors which are widely used for shape matching, interrogation, and visualization purposes. In this paper, we develop fast, accurate, and reliable methods for detecting the crest lines on surfaces approximated by dense triangle meshes. The methods exploit intrinsic geometric properties of the curvature extrema and provide with an inherent level-of-detail control of the detected crest lines. As an immediate application, we use of the crest lines for adaptive mesh simplification purposes.