Surface Fitting and Surface Displaying

The display of the surface of a three-dimensional object is an important problem in applications of graphics systems where the goal is to provide the user with different views of a group of solid objects. Surface fitting is also necessary when the objects are given initially as sets of points. Surface fitting and displaying are also of interest in other areas. In computerized cartography or geography one deals with models of terrain that are expressed as mathematical surfaces. In picture processing and pattern recognition, surfaces enter into image analysis in at least two ways. First, one can think of a picture as a surface by using the brightness values for the third coordinate. Second, one may wish to consider the surfaces of the objects that appear in a picture. Then the segmentation problem (Chapter 4) is reduced to identifying groups of pixels that are images of a single surface.