Ebook: From Surface To Objects. Computer Vision and Three Dimensional Scene Analysis

Издательство John Wiley, 1989, -360 pp.Three dimensional scene analysis has reached a turning point. Though re- searchers have been investigating object recognition and scene understanding since the late 1960’s, a new excitement can be felt in the field. I attribute this to four converging activities: (1) the increasing popularity and successes of stereo and active range sensing systems, (2) the set of emerging tools and competences concerned with three dimensional surface shape and its meaningful segmentation and description, (3) Marr’s attempt to place three dimensional vision into a more integrated and scientific context and (4) Brooks’ demonstration of what a more intelligent three dimensional scene understander might entail. It is the convergence of these that has led to the problem considered in this book: Assuming that we have easily accessible surface data and can segment it into useful patches, what can we then do with it?. The work presented here takes an integrated view of the problems and demonstrates that recognition can actually be done.
The central message of this book is that surface information can greatly simplify the image understanding process. This is because surfaces are the features that directly link perception to the objects perceived (for normal camera-like sensing) and because they make explicit information needed to understand and cope with some visual problems (e.g. obscured features). Hence, this book is as much about a style of model-based three dimensional scene analysis as about a particular example of that style. That style combines surface patches segmented from the three dimensional scene description, surface patch based object models, a hierarchy of representations, models and recognitions, a distributed network-based model invocation pro- cess, and a knowledge-based model matcher. Part of what I have tried to do was show that these elements really do fit together well – they make it easy to extend the competence of current vision systems without extraordinary complications, and don’t we all know how fragile complicated computer-based processes are?
This book is an organic entity – the research described started in 1982 and earlier results were reported in a PhD thesis in 1985. Since then, re- search has continued under the United Kingdom Alvey program, replacing weak results and extending into new areas, and most of the new results are included here. Some of the processes are still fairly simple and need further development, particularly when working with automatically segmented data. Thus, this book is really just a progress report and its content will continue to evolve. In a way, I hope that I will be able to rewrite the book in five to ten years, reporting that all problems have been solved by the computer vision community and showing that generic three dimensional object recognition can now be done. Who knows?An Introduction to Recognition Using Surfaces
Object Recognition from Surface Information
Surface Data as Input for Recognition
Making Complete Surface Hypotheses
Surface Clusters
Description of Three Dimensional Structures
Object Representation
Model Invocation
Hypothesis Construction
Hypothesis Verification
Discussion and Conclusions
A Portion of the Model Base