Construction of Branching Surface from 2-D Contours

In the present work, an attempt has been made to construct branching surface from 2-D contours, which are given at different layers and may have branches. If a layer having more than one contour and corresponds to contour at adjacent layers, then it is termed as branching problem and approximated by adding additional points in between the layers. Firstly, the branching problem is converted to single contour case in which there is no branching at any layer and the final branching surface is obtained by skinning. Contours are constructed from the given input points at different layers by energy-based B-Spline approximation. 3-D curves are constructed after adding additional points into the contour points for all the layers having branching problem by using energy-based B-Spline formulation. Final 3-D surface is obtained by skinning 3-D curves and 2-D contours. There are three types of branching problems: (a) One-to-one, (b) One-to-many and (c) Many-to-many. Oneto-one problem has been done by plethora of researchers based on minimizations of twist and curvature and different tiling techniques. One-to-many problem is the one in which at least one plane must have more than one contour and have correspondence with the contour at adjacent layers. Many-to-many problem is stated as m contours at i-th layer and n contours at (i+1)th layer. This problem can be solved by combining one-to-many branching methodology. Branching problem is very important in CAD, medical imaging and geographical information system(GIS).