Determination of a holdsite of a curved object using range data

Curved 3D objects represented by range data contain large amounts of information compared with planar objects, but do not have distinct features for matching to those of object models. This makes it difficult to represent and identify a general 3D curved object. This paper introduces a new approach to representing and finding a holdsite of general 3D curved objects using range data. We develop a three-dimensional generalized Hough transformation which can be also applied to general 3D curved object recognition and which reduces both the computation time and storage requirements. Our approach makes use of the relative geometric differences between particular points on the object surface and some model points which are prespecified arbitrarily and task dependently.