A symbolic representation for 3D object feature detection

We define a spatial symbolic model that can be used to describe classes of 3D objects (anatomical and man-made) and a method for finding correspondences between the features of the symbolic models and point sets of 3D mesh data. An abstract symbolic model is used to describe spatial object classes in terms of parts, boundaries, and spatial associations. A working model is a mechanism to link the symbolic model to geometric information found in a sensed instance of the class, represented by a 3D mesh data set. Matching is performed in a three-step procedure that first finds working sets of points in the mesh, then fits constructed features to these sets, and finally selects a subset of these constructed features that best correspond to the features of the working model