
122 Curvatures: A Differential Geometry Tool
Figure 8.4: Using principal curvatures (shown in blue and red), a surface
can be efficiently represented in terms of polygons. Such a curvature-
aware polygonal representation of the surface, as shown in the right
figure, helps to better retain geometric features, thus preserving surface
qualities using a given polygon count [ACSD
+
03].
Curvature of a curve
Curvatures measure the extent of bending. This is a differential
property that can be defined as a measure of the rate of deviation
between the surface and the tangent plane of that surface at a
given point.
Let us first examine the notion of curvature in 1D, where ...