A SURFACE INTERSECTION ALGORITHM BASED ON LOOP DETECTION

Abstract

A robust and efficient surface intersection algorithm that is implementable in floating point arithmetic, accepts surfaces algebraic or otherwise and which operates without human supervision is critical to boundary representation solid modeling. To the author's knowledge, no such algorithms has been developed. All tolerance-based subdivision algorithms will fail on surfaces with sufficiently small intersections. Algebraic techniques, while promising robustness, are presently too slow to be practical and do not accept non-algebraic surfaces. Algorithms based on loop detection hold promise. They do not require tolerances except those associated with machine associated with machine arithmetic, and can handle any surface for which there is a method to construct bounds on the surface and its Gauss map. Published loop detection algorithms are, however, still too slow and do not deal with singularities. We present a new loop detection criterion and discuss its use in a surface intersection algorithms. The algorithm, like other loop detection based intersection algorithms, subdivides the surfaces into pairs of sub-patches which do not intersect in any closed loops. This paper presents new strategies for subdividing surfaces in a way that causes the algorithms to run quickly even when the intersection curve(s) contain(s) singularities.