Matching of developable surfaces

A matching algorithm is presented for the recognition of an important class of surfaces called the developable surface. Such a surface is represented by a line-of-curvature description (LCD). The algorithm matches the LCD of an unknown surface and those of model surfaces on the Gaussian sphere to determine the corresponding model surface of the unknown. This matching scheme is capable of recognizing a developable surface not only when it is identical to a model surface, but also when it has different attitude and scale from and/or is only a part of the corresponding model