An Overview Of Three Dimensional Object Recognition

AN OVERVIEW OF THREE - DIMENSIONAL OBJECT RECOGNITION

Three-dimensional Computer Vision

This monograph by one of the world's leading vision researchers provides a thorough, mathematically rigorous exposition of a broad and vital area in computer vision: the problems and techniques related to three-dimensional (stereo) vision and motion. The emphasis is on using geometry to solve problems in stereo and motion, with examples from navigation and object recognition. Faugeras takes up such important problems in computer vision as projective geometry, camera calibration, edge detection, stereo vision (with many examples on real images), different kinds of representations and transformations (especially 3-D rotations), uncertainty and methods of addressing it, and object representation and recognition. His theoretical account is illustrated with the results of actual working programs.Three-Dimensional Computer Vision proposes solutions to problems arising from a specific robotics scenario in which a system must perceive and act. Moving about an unknown environment, the system has to avoid static and mobile obstacles, build models of objects and places in order to be able to recognize and locate them, and characterize its own motion and that of moving objects, by providing descriptions of the corresponding three-dimensional motions. The ideas generated, however, can be used indifferent settings, resulting in a general book on computer vision that reveals the fascinating relationship of three-dimensional geometry and the imaging process.

Three-Dimensional Computer Vision

The purpose of computer vision is to make computers capable of understanding environments from visual information. Computer vision has been an interesting theme in the field of artificial intelligence. It involves a variety of intelligent information processing: both pattern processing for extraction of meaningful symbols from visual information and symbol processing for determining what the symbols represent. The term "3D computer vision" is used if visual information has to be interpreted as three-dimensional scenes. 3D computer vision is more challenging because objects are seen from limited directions and some objects are occluded by others. In 1980, the author wrote a book "Computer Vision" in Japanese to introduce an interesting new approach to visual information processing developed so far. Since then computer vision has made remarkable progress: various rangefinders have become available, new methods have been developed to obtain 3D informa tion, knowledge representation frameworks have been proposed, geometric models which were developed in CAD/CAM have been used for computer vision, and so on. The progress in computer vision technology has made it possible to understand more complex 3 D scenes. There is an increasing demand for 3D computer vision. In factories, for example, automatic assembly and inspection can be realized with fewer con straints than conventional ones which employ two-dimensional computer vision.