物体渐变技术在虚拟现实、工业模拟、科学计算可视化、动画生成等领域有着广泛的应用，具有十分重要的意义，近年来，有许多研究者提出了一些效果不错的算法，对这些算法进行了分析，并对物体渐变的基本原理、物体的表示方法与渐变技术间的紧密联系、二维物体渐变技术和三维物体渐变技术做了较全面的综述，探讨了现有物体渐变技术中需要改进的关键问题，并给出了渐变技术在未来的发展方向。

A metamorphosis or a morphing is the process of continuously transformation one object into another, which is widely studied in graphics, simulation, animation and virtual reality technologies etc., and has great signification. Many metamorphosis techniques have been proposed in recent years for 2D or 3D objects. An almost comprehensive survey of the different approaches of object metamorphosis is presented in this paper. Study and development of metamorphosis problem is given in the field of the metamorphosis principle, 2D metamorphosis and 3D metamorphosis technologies, especially the technologies based on mathematical morphology. The final section analyzes the key points and the prospects of object metamorphosis, which lead to the important problems to be considered and solved.