Abstract. Decorative reliefs are widely used for e.g. packaging and porcelain design. In periodic reliefs, the relief repeats a pattern, for example all the way around an underlying surface of revolution. Reverseengineering of existing reliefs allows them to be re-applied to different base surfaces; we show here how to segment a single repeat unit of a periodic relief starting from a scanned triangle mesh. We first briefly review how we segment the relief from the background surface using our previous work. The rest of the paper then concentrates on how we extract a single repeat unit from the relief. To do so, the user provides two points on one relief boundary which are in approximate correspondence on consecutive repeats of the relief. We first refine the relative locations of these points, and then determine a third corresponding point using relief boundary information. These are used to determine three initial cutting planes across the relief. Then surface registration strategies are utilised to refine the correspondence between adjacent repeat units. Finally, we refine the exact locations of the cutting planes by considering only surface information close to the cutting planes. This allows a repeat unit of the periodic relief to be extracted. We demonstrate that our algorithm is successful and practical, using various real scanned models: user input can be quite imprecise, and we can cope with hand-made reliefs in which the pattern units are only approximately copies of each other. 1

Fig. 1. Relief segmentation for a porcelain box lid; relief segmented by earlier snake-based method; refined result using the method in this paper. Reverse engineering of reliefs aims to turn an existing relief superimposed on an underlying surface into a geometric model which may be applied to a different base surface. Steps in this process include segmenting the relief from the background, and describing it as an offset height field relative to the underlying surface. We have previously considered relief segmentation using a geometric snake. Here, we show how to use this initial segmentation to estimate the background surface lying under the relief, which can be used (i) to refine the segmentation and (ii) to express the relief as an offset field. Our approach fits a B-spline surface patch to the measured background data surrounding the relief, while tension terms ensure this background surface smoothly continues underneath the relief where there are no measured background data points to fit. After making an initial estimate of relief offset height everywhere within the patch, we use a support vector machine to refine the segmentation. Tests demonstrate that this approach can accurately model the background surface where it underlies the relief, providing more accurate segmentation, as well as relief height field estimation. In particular, this approach provides significant improvements for relief concavities with narrow mouths and can segment reliefs with small internal holes.