Digital Surface Curvature

In recent years, the 3D digitization of cultural artefacts, such as buildings and statues, has become an important tool in archaeological preservation and research. The advantages of a digital version of an artefact include archival permanence and wide accessibility for analysis and study. This book explores and develops surface curvature based methods for analysing and visualizing such 3D digital data. The theoretical foundations of surface curvature, along with some new developments, are covered in the first part of the book. The second part of the book reports a range of practical results obtained working with a digitization of Michelangelo's David statue. This work should be of interest to both the archaeological community as well as computer scientists who have an interest in 3D digitization.