We present an efficient method for classifying the morphology of the
intersection curve of two quadrics (QSIC) in PR3, 3D real projective space;
here, the term morphology is used in a broad sense to mean the shape,
topological, and algebraic properties of a QSIC, including singularity,
reducibility, the number of connected components, and the degree of each
irreducible component, etc. There are in total 35 different QSIC morphologies
with non-degenerate quadric pencils. For each of these 35 QSIC morphologies,
through a detailed study of the eigenvalue curve and the index function jump we
establish a characterizing algebraic condition expressed in terms of the Segre
characteristics and the signature sequence of a quadric pencil. We show how to
compute a signature sequence with rational arithmetic so as to determine the
morphology of the intersection curve of any two given quadrics. Two immediate
applications of our results are the robust topological classification of QSIC
in computing B-rep surface representation in solid modeling and the derivation
of algebraic conditions for collision detection of quadric primitives
