Representation and maintenance of a composite surface model

This paper describes the current state of an on-going project to develop techniques for maintaining a coherent model of the surfaces in a scene from a variety of sources of surface information. The introduction describes the motivation for viewing abstract descriptions of surface data as hypotheses with an explicit representation of the uncertainty of spatial attributes and the uncertainty of existence. Primitive elements are then defined for representing surface patches and contours, and the internal constraints within these primitives are described. Finally, an algorithm is presented for updating a composite surface model based on 3-D information expressed with these primitives.