3-DIMENSIONAL OBJECT REPRESENTATION AND RECOGNITION BASED ON SURFACE NORMAL IMAGES

A new idea of using surface normal images (SNIs) for object description and recognition dealing with range images is presented. The surface normal images of an object are defined as the projected images obtained from view angles facing normal to each surface of the object. The proposed approach can significantly alleviate the difficulty involved in obtaining a correct correspondence between a scene object and a model by explicitly providing a transform for the matching. The SNI-based object description is applied to the construction of a three-dimensional (3D) object recognition system targeted for the 20 simulated objects. The operation of the overall system is shown through the experiment for various synthetic and real range images.