Segmentation and estimation of surfaces from statistical probability of texture features

This paper presents an approach to segment an image into areas of surfaces, and to compute the surface properties from a gray-scale image in order to describe the surfaces for reconstruction of the 3-D shape of the objects. In general, an rigid body has several surfaces and many edges. But if it is not polyhedoron, it is necessary not only to describe the relation between surfaces, i.e. its line drawings but also to represent the surfaces' equations itself. In order to compute the surfaces' equation we use a probability of edge distribution. At first it is extracted edges from a gray-level image as much as possible. These are not only the points that maximize the change of an image intensuty but candidates which can be seemed to be edges. Next, other character of a surface (color, coordinates and image intensity) are extracted. In our study, we call the all feature of a surface as "texture", for example color, intensity level, orientation of an edge, shape of a surface and so on. These features of a surface on a pixel of an image plane are mapped to a point of the feature space, and segmented to each groups by cluster analysis on this space. These groups are considered to represent object surface in an image plane. Finally, the states of object surface in 3-D space are computed from distributional probability of local and overall statistical features of a surface, and from shape of a surface.a surface.