Finding breaking curves in 3D surfaces

In this paper we present a recursive least squares technique for extracting the breaking curve of a 3D range open surface. Unlike differential operators-based methods, the algorithm we propose is robust to noise and is applied to unorganized point sets. No assumptions such as smoothness and/or continuity on the boundary's shape are performed. The method we present deals with large amount of data under a low computational cost, since no local computation is performed. A global approach is given to the technique in order to make it more robust, faster and simpler than individual point plus neighbours approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.