  Surface topography refers to the geometric micro-structure of a surface and
defines its tactile characteristics (typically in the sub-millimeter range).
High-resolution 3D scanning techniques developed recently enable the 3D
reconstruction of surfaces including their surface topography. In his paper, we
present an efficient image-space technique for the extraction of surface
topography from high-resolution 3D reconstructions. Additionally, we filter
noise and enhance topographic attributes to obtain an improved representation
for subsequent topography classification. Comprehensive experiments show that
the our representation captures well topographic attributes and significantly
improves classification performance compared to alternative 2D and 3D
representations.
