Reconstruction of rational ruled surfaces from their silhouettes

Abstract

We provide algorithms to reconstruct rational ruled surfaces in three-dimensional projective space from the “apparent contour” of a single projection to the projective plane. We deal with the case of tangent developables and of general projections to P3 of rational normal scrolls. In the first case, we use the fact that every such surface is the projection of the tangent developable of a rational normal curve, while in the second we start by reconstructing the rational normal scroll. In both instances we then reconstruct the correct projection to P3 of these surfaces by exploiting the information contained in the singularities of the apparent contour.