Extraction of ridge and valley lines from unorganized points

Given an unstructured point set, we use an MLS (moving least-squares) approximation to estimate the local curvatures and their derivatives at a point by means of an approximating surface. Then, we compute neighbor information using a Delaunay tessellation. Ridge and valley points can then be detected as zero-crossings, and connected using curvature directions. We demonstrate our method on several large point-sampled models, rendered by point-splatting, on which the ridge and valley lines are rendered with line width determined from curvatures.