Principal curvatures from the integral invariant viewpoint

The extraction of curvature information for surfaces is a basic problem of Geometry Processing. Recently an integral invariant solution of this problem was presented, which is based on principal component analysis of local neighborhoods defined by kernel balls of various sizes. It is not only robust to noise, but also adjusts to the level of detail required. In the present paper we show an asymptotic analysis of the moments of inertia and the principal directions which are used in this approach. We also address implementation and, briefly, robustness issues and applications. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.