The Spherical Images of Triangular Mesh Surfaces

The representation of triangular mesh surface is proposed using spherical image. Surface signals like normals and curvatures are stored in spherical images using spherical parameterization and partition of the sphere. The generation depends on several geometric signals, not one single geometric signal. So its color reflects the properties of the triangular mesh surface more clearly. With simple arrays similar to 2D image, the spherical image can be post-processed easily using sophisticated image processing algorithms. Applications include segmentation, editing and model retrieval.