Affine-invariant curvature estimators for implicit surfaces Original Research Article

Affine Differential Geometry provides a set of measures invariant under a larger set of transformations compared to rigid motions. This leads to several applications using robust shape descriptors. Although affine-invariant operations are already used for surfaces, they do not intend to approximate the definitions of Affine Differential Geometry, which are the basis for further differential invariants. In this work we propose estimators for the local affine structure of an implicit surface, i.e. the affine metric, the co-normal and normal vectors, and the affine Gaussian and mean curvatures. The direct derivation of the formulae from the implicit function theorem lead to very intensive computations and numerical instabilities. This work further proposes a geometrical reduction allowing a much simpler and more stable formulae, and compares the results by incorporating the proposed estimators in Marching Cubes based algorithms.