Modelling of irregularly sampled surfaces by two-dimensional snakes

A new method for the modelling of irregularly sampled surfaces is presented. The surfaces under consideration allow discontinuities of the first and higher derivatives. The method discussed is a generalization of the so called snakes approximation method. The variational problem, which is part of the snakes modelling, turns out to be the weighted sum of a membrane and a thin-plate-spline kernel. The variational problem is solved by the direct method using scaled and shifted Gaussians as base functions. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated for a set of laser-scanning data. AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank Prof. Siegfried Meier from Dresden University of Technology, Germany, for his encouragement and suggestions to this work. They also wish to acknowledge the support of the KBN, State Committee for Scientific Research, Poland under grant no. 5 T12E 057 22 and the reviewers for their helpful comments.