Infrared Image-Based 3D Surface Reconstruction of Free-Form Texture-Less Objects

The analysis of infrared (IR) images obtained from a robot-mounted camera is presented, with the purpose to reconstruct the 3D surface of texture-less objects located in close range to the camera. The prospective application of this approach is object's pose recognition with the aim of object grasping by a robot hand. Algorithms are developed that rely on the analysis of the luminance distribution in the IR image (the so-called shape-from-shading approach), followed by a depth-map approximation. Laboratory tests were carried out in order to evaluate the quality of obtained depth maps on some reference objects and to compare the estimated depth maps with corresponding point clouds acquired by a MS-Kinect device.