Silhouette/Contour Detection on Polygonal Models

Description:

Generating object silhouettes/contours lies at the heart of non-photorealism. This article surveys algorithms for computing polygonal model silhouettes/contours to help ﬁnd the optimal approach for developers' speciﬁc needs. In particular, we distinguish between image-space, hybrid, and object-space techniques and investigate their respective suitability for stylization. For this purpose also speed-up techniques to object-space silhouette extraction techniques are described.

Paper download: (1.7 MB)

Demo:

Some of the silhouette detection techniques can be seen in this tool:

Silhouette generation and stylization demo v1.3 (Win32, 3.7 MB; also works under Linux using Wine)
Models to be used with the demo (2.2 MB)

Main Reference:

Tobias Isenberg, Bert Freudenberg, Nick Halper, Stefan Schlechtweg, and Thomas Strothotte (2003) A Developer’s Guide to Silhouette Algorithms for Polygonal Models. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 23(4):28–37, July/August 2003.

BibTeX entry:



@ARTICLE{Isenberg:2003:ADG,
  author      = {Tobias Isenberg and Bert Freudenberg and Nick Halper and Stefan Schlechtweg and Thomas Strothotte},
  title       = {A Developer's Guide to Silhouette Algorithms for Polygonal Models},
  journal     = {IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications},
  year        = {2003},
  volume      = {23},
  number      = {4},
  month       = jul # {/} # aug,
  pages       = {28--37},
  doi         = {10.1109/MCG.2003.1210862},
  doi_url     = {https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2003.1210862},
  url         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/p/Isenberg2003ADG},
  url2        = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/p/Isenberg2002SSA},
  pdf         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/personal/papers/Isenberg_2003_ADG.pdf},
}

This work was done at the Department of Simulation and Graphics at the University of Magdeburg, Germany.