Robust Estimation of Surface Curvature Information from Point Cloud Data

Abstract: This paper surveys and evaluates some popular state of the art methods for algorithmic curvature and normal estimation. In addition to surveying existing methods we also propose a new method for robust curvature estimation and evaluate it against existing methods thus demonstrating its superiority to existing methods in the case of significant data noise. Throughout this paper we are concerned with computation in low dimensional spaces (N < 10) and primarily focus on the computation of the Weingarten map and quantities that may be derived from this; however, the algorithms discussed are theoretically applicable in any dimension. One thing that is common to all these methods is their basis in an estimated graph structure. For any of these methods to work the local geometry of the manifold must be exploited; however, in the case of point cloud data it is often difficult to discover a robust manifold structure underlying the data, even in simple cases, which can greatly influence the results of these algorithms. We hope that in pushing these algorithms to their limits we are able to discover, and perhaps resolve, many major pitfalls that may affect potential users and future researchers hoping to improve these methods