Automatic extraction of topographic features using adaptive triangular meshes

A method is described for the extraction of morphological information from images approximated by triangular meshes. Topographic features such as peaks, pits, ridges, valleys, and planar regions are considered the basic descriptive surface elements and are defined in terms of the local organization of the triangles in the mesh. The approach is suitable for image analysis tasks, simplifying object recognition and scene interpretation. Several images have been used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.