Reconstruction of rational ruled surfaces from their silhouettes (Q2229722)

The authors provide algorithms to reconstruct rational ruled surfaces in three-dimensional projective space from the ``apparent contour'' of a single projection to the projective plane. For this purpose, first it is considered a special subcase of rational ruled surfaces, the case of tangent developables. In this case, the authors use the fact that every such surface is the projection of the tangent developable of a rational normal curve. Secondly, the authors deal with general projections to \(\mathbb{P}^3\) of rational normal scrolls. In this case, the idea is to reconstruct the rational normal scroll. In both instances, the authors reconstruct the correct projection to \(\mathbb{P}^3\) of these surfaces by exploiting the information contained in the singularities of the apparent contour. In addition, the authors presents the algorithms derived from the results presented, they show the effectiveness and provide an implementation in Maple of the algorithms developed in this paper.