Multimodal Range Image Segmentation by Curve Grouping

A fast range image segmentation method for scenes comprising general faced objects is introduced. The range segmentation is based on a recursive adaptive probabilistic detection of step discontinuities which are present at object face borders in mutually registered range and intensity data. Detected face outlines guides the subsequent region growing step where the neighbouring face curves are grouped together. Region growing based on curve segments instead of pixels like in the classical approaches considerably speed up the algorithm. The exploitation of multimodal data significantly improves the segmentation quality