The Extraction of Feature Lines on 3D Models: A Survey

Feature lines are perceptually important features on 3D models, and have extensive applications such as mesh simplification, re-gridding, shape analysis, non-photorealistic rendering and surface smoothing, etc. This paper gives a comprehensive survey on this field, which has not been summarized before. According to whether feature lines are associated with the line of sight, feature lines can be classified into two categories: view-dependent curves and view-independent curves. Besides, view-independent curves can be further classified according to the type of 3D models, and view-dependent curves can be classified according to the property of feature lines. A complete classified method of feature lines on 3D models is proposed in this paper, and the challenges for feature extraction are also discussed briefly.