A spherical representation for recognition of free-form surfaces

Martial Hébert (1) , Katsuchi Ikeuchi (1) , Hervé Delingette (2)

1 The Robotics Institute
2 EPIDAURE - Medical imaging and robotics

We introduce a new surface representation for recognizing curved objects. Our approach begins by representing an object by a discrete mesh of points built from range data or from a geometric model of the object. The mesh is computed from the data by deforming a standard shaped mesh, for example, an ellipsoid, until it fits the surface of the object. We define local regularity constraints that the mesh must satisfy. We then define a canonical mapping between the mesh describing the object and a standard spherical mesh. A surface curvature index that is poseinvariant is stored at every node of the mesh. We use this object representation for recognition by comparing the spherical model of a reference object with the model extracted from a new observed scene. We show how the similarity between reference model and observed data can be evaluated and we show how the pose of the reference object in the observed scene can be easily computed using this representation. We present results on real range images which show that this approach to modelling and recognizing 3D objects has three main advantages:

Mots clés: Computer vision; Data mining; Deformable models; Distributed computing; Face recognition; Image recognition; Layout; Shape; Solid modeling; Surface fitting

Domaines: Imagerie médicale; Modélisation et simulation; Imagerie; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Martial Hébert, Katsuchi Ikeuchi, Hervé Delingette. A spherical representation for recognition of free-form surfaces. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 1995, 17 (7), pp.681-690. ⟨10.1109/34.391410⟩. ⟨inria-00615054⟩