Algebraic error analysis for surface curvatures of 3-D range images obtained by different methods

Algebraic error analysis for the calculated surface curvatures of 3-D range images is presented for four curvature estimation techniques in the literature. The error analysis is used to study the experimental results obtained by P.J. Flynn and A.K. Jain (1989). It is concluded that the two methods which give better curvature estimations with comparative accuracies have almost identical curvature error bounds. The weaknesses of the other two methods are not due to large error terms in the calculated curvatures, but rather to other factors, such as inaccurate determination of the tangent planes or inaccurate estimations of the directional first- and second-order derivatives