An efficient parallel algorithm for geometrically characterising drawings of a class of 3-D objects

Labelling the lines of a planar line drawing of a 3-D object in a way that reflects the geometric properties of the object is a much studied problem in computer vision, considered to be an important step towards understanding the object from its 2-D drawing. Combinatorially, the labellability problem is a Constraint Satisfaction Problem and has been shown to be NP-complete even for images of polyhedral scenes. In this paper, we examine scenes that consist of a set of objects each obtained by rotating a polygon around an arbitrary axis. The objects are allowed to arbitrarily intersect or overlay. We show that for these scenes, there is a sequential lineartime labelling algorithm. Moreover, we show that the algorithm has a fast parallel version that executes inO(log³ n) time on an Exclusive-Read-Exclusive-Write Parallel Random Access Machine withO(n ³/log³ n) processors. The algorithm not only answers the decision problem of labellability, but also produces a legal labelling, if there is one. This parallel algorithm should be contrasted with the techniques of dealing with special cases of the constraint satisfaction problem. These techniques employ an effective, but inherently sequential, relaxation procedure in order to restrict the domains of the variables.This research was partially supported by the European Community ESPRIT Basic Research Program under contracts 7141 (project ALCOM II) and 6019 (project Insight II).