Rectangular parallelepiped coding: A volumetric representation of three-dimensional objects

A new three-dimensional object representation scheme called rectangular parallelepiped coding is presented. Rectangular parallelepiped coding is an extension to three-dimensional space of the two-dimensional rectangular coding scheme. It is a volume-based representation of three-dimensional objects constructed from three orthogonal views (silhouettes) of the object using volume intersection method and is coded as a list of rectangular parallelepipeds. The representation is versatile and easily edited. For the objects coded in this representation, the operations of translation, rotation, and scaling are easily performed and the properties of volume, surface, and moments are easily computed. Examples are given for which processing time and storage requirements are examined.