Fusion of depth and intensity data for three-dimensional object representation and recognition

Date

1991-12

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

For humans, retinal images provide sufficient information for the complete understanding of three-dimensional (3-D) shapes in a scene. The ultimate goal of computer vision is to develop an automated system able to reproduce some of the tasks performed in a natural way by human beings as recognition, classification, or analysis of the environment as basis for further decisions. At the first level, referred to as early computer vision, the task is to extract symbolic descriptive information in a scene from a variety of sensory data.

The second level is concerned with classification, recognition, or decision systems and the related heuristics, that aid the processing of the available information.

This research is concerned with a new approach to 3-D object representation and recognition using an interpolation scheme applied to the information from the fusion of range and intensity data. The range image acquisition uses a methodology based on a passive stereo-vision model originally developed to be used with a sequence of images.^^ However, curved features, large disparities and noisy input images are some of the problems associated with real imagery, which need to be addressed prior to applying the matching techniques in the spatial frequency domain. Some of the above mentioned problems can only be solved by computationally intensive spatial domain algorithms. Regularization techniques are explored for surface recovery from sparse range data, and intensity images are incorporated in the final representation of the surface. As an important application, the problem of 3-D representation of retinal images for extraction of quantitative information is addressed.

Range information is also combined with intensity data to provide a more accurate numerical description based on aspect graphs. This representation is used as input to a three-dimensional object recognition system. Such an approach results in an improved performance of 3-D object classifiers.

Description

Keywords

Image processing, Computer vision, Three-dimensional display systems

Citation