3-D Object Extraction Using Volume Computation

Abstract

This paper describes an alternative approach to extracting 3-D objects and volumes, from lists of given faces, edges, vertices, and the vertices' coordinates. Most graphics file formats store 3-D information for various purposes as a list of polygons, which does not provide a direct indication of structure or relationships between each object. This leads to the limitation of object identification within the list of data. The proposed algorithm was developed as part of a method for finding the Abstract Cellular Complex of an object. The volumes (whether closed or open) of an object are determined from the input set of faces. Each object is then extracted according to its manifold. This algorithm can identify every volume and extract them from the set of given data when the object(s) represented by the data have a genus of 0.