Fast and Faithful Geometric Algorithm for Detecting Crest Lines on Meshes

A new geometry-based finite difference method for a fast and reliable detection of perceptually salient curvature extrema on surfaces approximated by dense triangle meshes is proposed. The foundations of the method are two simple curvature and curvature derivative formulas overlooked in modern differential geometry textbooks and seemingly new observation about inversion-invariant local surface-based differential forms.