surfacedeep

Surfacedeep is a term used in computer graphics, computer vision, and geometric modeling to denote a measure of the depth of a surface within a chosen reference frame. It is commonly applied to depth maps and 3D representations to describe how far a surface point is from a reference plane or along a specified depth axis.

One common interpretation is as a depth map value: for a surface described by coordinates (x, y, z) in camera or world coordinates, surfacedeep at the image coordinate (x, y) is the z value, representing the distance from the camera plane to the surface along the depth axis. In other contexts depth values may be signed and measured along a non-vertical axis.

A second interpretation is the signed distance along a fixed direction from a reference plane to the surface point, which is often used in geoscience or 3D scanning to designate how far beneath or above a baseline the surface lies.

Computation and estimation: Surfacedep values can be obtained directly from depth sensors such as RGB-D cameras and LiDAR, estimated from stereo or structured-light systems, or computed from a mesh or volume representation by projecting points to the depth axis or by evaluating a distance function.

Applications: Depth-based rendering, occlusion culling, collision detection, terrain modeling, and alignment of multi-view reconstructions.

Challenges: Handling missing data, varying resolution, sensor noise, coordinate system conventions, and occlusions that cause gaps in depth measurements.

In literature, surfacedeep is sometimes used interchangeably with depth, height, or distance-to-plane measures, depending on the axis and reference plane chosen.