Adaptive estimation of normals and surface area for discrete 3-D objects: application to snow binary data from X-ray tomography.

Estimating the normal vector field on the boundary of discrete three-dimensional objects is essential for rendering and image measurement problems. Most of the existing algorithms do not provide an accurate determination of the normal vector field for shapes that present edges. Here, we propose a new and simple computational method in order to obtain accurate results on all types of shapes, whatever their local convexity degree.