Surface flattening is a crucial problem for many applications as indicated by the steady flow of new methods appearing in related publications. Quality control of these methods, by means of
accuracy criteria
independent of particular flattening methodologies, has not been addressed yet by researchers. This is exactly the subject of this paper: a detailed analysis of flattening is presented leading to geometric and physics-based criteria. These are implemented in intuitively-acceptable visualization techniques, which are applied to practical examples.
Keywords Planar developments - parameterizations - flattening accuracy - digital surfaces - isometry - isometric mapping - shape deformation - triangle-based surface representation - physics-based criteria - graphics-based methods
AMS Subject Classification 68U05 - 68U07 - 68U20 - 65D17 - 65D18