CONSTRUCTION OF BIOLOGICAL SURFACE MODELS FROM CROSS-SECTIONS

An approach improving on existing techniques is presented for blending cross-sections of biological objects to produce a polynomial surface model. As intermediate steps to the final surface skinning, representa tive data points on the cross-sections are selected for defining piece wise cubic B-splines providing an immediate reduction in storage and c omputational requirements for the contour representation of the object s. A mesh of quadrilateral patches is subsequently formed over adjacen t cross-sections using bicubic B-spline surfaces which exhibit second parametric derivative (C2) continuity. The surface model provides a co mplete and robust representation with significant data reduction. The resulting algorithm is demonstrated using bone data of a human hand.