Describing and Recognizing 3-D Objects Using Surface Properties

Surface properties play a very important role in many perception tasks. Object recognition, navigation, and inspection use surface properties ex­ tensively. Characterizing surfaces at different scales in given data is often the first and possibly the most important step. Most early research in ma­ chine perception relied on only very coarse characterization of surfaces. In the last few years, surface characterization has been receiving due attention. Dr. T. J. Fan is one of the very few researchers who designed and im­ plemented a complete system for object recognition. He studied issues re­ lated to characterization of surfaces in the context of object recognition, and then uses the features thus developed for recognizing objects. He uses a multi-view representation of 3-D objects for recognition, and he devel­ ops techniques for the segmentation of range images to obtain features for recognition. His matching approach also allows him to recognize objects from their partial views in the presence of other occluding objects. The efficacy of his approach is demonstrated in many examples.