Segmentation of three dimensional range data

A new approach to segmentation of range image data into quadric surfaces is treated here. The segmentation consists of three stages. First, an initial segmentation produces coarse surface regions classed as plane, cylinder, or sphere. The algorithm operates on contours, or 2D slices, of the data rather than the 3D range image data. Second, constrained surface fitting is used to obtain surface parameter estimates for each segmented region. And third, a high accuracy segmentation results in both a high resolution boundary between surface regions and accurate quadric surface parameters. The algorithm is hierarchical and works in stages from low to high image resolution while updating surface parameter estimates at each stage. Experimental results with synthetic and real range images are given.