SURFACE DEFINITION FOR BRANCHING, CONTOUR-DEFINED OBJECTS.

Abstract

Recent work on mapping polygonal surface mosaics onto contour defined objects has resulted in minimum flow algorithms which do a good job of mapping a surface between two single contours. This report extends these algorithms to handle contour defined objects which are highly branched and have holes. For branching contours where n contours in section i are connected to m contours in section i plus i, the surfaces are mapped by first concatenating the section i contours into a single large contour using a minimum number of minimum distance links, similarly concatenating the section i plus i contours, then performing the one to one mapping between the resulting composite contours. Capping off a single arbitrarily shaped contour may be done by computing the medial axis transform of the contour, constructing the medial axis contour and mapping a surface from the contour to the medial axis contour.