Generating a Texture Map from Object-Surface Texture Data

Abstract

A number of 3D digitizing methods, including stereopsis, are capable of measuring not only an object s shape but also its surface texture. Measured shape data can be expressed as a polyhedron whose faces are triangular, and object-surface texture data can be represented in the form of color data for each of the vertices of the various triangles. The ability to apply object-surface texture data directly to the creation of computer graphics images has been severely limited by the extreme difficulty of expressing such texture data in the image from which conventional texture mapping proceeds (commonly referred to as a texture map). Proposed here is a method that generates a texture map from object-surface texture data. First, the method reduces the number of triangles in the polyhedron while preserving essentially all the color data that it originally contained. Next, it arranges the triangles in the simplified triangle mesh onto a plane, and generates a texture map from this arrangement. This method preserves the full texture of an object, no matter how complex its shape, an advantage over the conventional cylindrical texture representation approach. Furthermore, since essentially all color data has been retained, the reduction in the number of triangles does not produce any significant reduction in the texture-realism of the object image produced.