An approach to 3-D object identification using range images

The problem of speedily and reliably interpreting range data for industrial object recognition is becoming critically important in the field of robotics and computer vision. This paper presents one approach to attack this problem. It attempts to perform as much classification analysis as possible during the off-line learning process, while only a very small subset of the range data needs to be processed for the on-line recognition. An adaptive matched filter is developed to extract an object´s surface feature vectors using range measurement and surface normals. A sparse representation for each object category j is constructed for classification purpose in the form of a Rj-table of selected feature vectors. The approach, based on the concept of the generalized Hough Transform, classifies an object by examining the maximum votes which it receives from various Ri-tables. An optimal selection rule is established for minimizing the misclassification probability. An experiment with a set of simulated range images of nine categories demonstrated the success of the proposed methodology.