In computer-aided design and meshing, it is often important to identify the discontinuities (singularities) in coarse surface meshes. Due to the potential low resolution and noise, it is challenging to detect such features. We propose systematic characterizations of the edges, corners, and curves at the singularities of a mesh and develop algorithms to identify these geometric features. Our algorithms can detect C1 discontinuities as well as typical C2 discontinuities. We present the analysis of correctness of our method and demonstrate its effectiveness experimentally using stereolithographic (STL) meshes as well as coarse finite-element meshes of real-world objects. Key words: Discontinuities, singularity analysis, feature identification, feature extraction, surface modeling, reverse engineering
Xiangmin Jiao, Narasimha R. Bayyana