Curvature and torsion estimators based on parametric curve fitting

Many applications of geometry processing and computer vision rely on geometric properties of curves, particularly their curvature. Several methods have already been proposed to estimate the curvature of a planar curve, most of them for curves in digital spaces. This work proposes a new scheme for estimating curvature and torsion of planar and spatial curves, based on weighted least-squares fitting and local arc-length approximation. The method is simple enough to admit a convergence analysis that takes into account the effect of noise in the samples. The implementation of the method is compared to other curvature estimation methods showing a good performance. Applications to prediction in geometry compression are presented both as a practical application and as a validation of this new scheme.