Estimating 3-D surface geometrical features on the basis of surface curvature consistency

This paper presents a method of estimating 3-D surface geometrical features that are necessary for 3-D object recognition and image interpretation. The features, such as surface needle maps and curvatures, are computed from range or intensity images. In general, the range and intensity images are prone to noises, and hence the features computed by differentiation calculi on such a noisy image are hardly applicable to industrial recognition tasks. In our approach, we try to obtain a more accurate estimate of the features by using a least-squares minimization procedure subject to local curvature consistency constraints. The algorithm is robust with respect to noises and is completely independent of the viewpoint at which the image is taken. The performance of the ajgoritlim is evaluated using both synthetic data and real intensity images.