Single view recognition and pose estimation of 3D objects using sets of prototypical views and spatially tolerant contour representations

We show that a multiple-view approach to 3D recognition basing upon spatially tolerant contour representations is both straight and tractable. The approach is straight with respect to the ease in extending an existing distance- and orientation-invariant 2D robot-vision-system to a 3D recognition system. It is tractable with respect to the number of required views of an object to enable fast and reliable recognition from arbitrary viewpoints. Depending on the choice of system parameters 20-30 views of an object with relatively high structural complexity (e.g. an aeroplane) must be learnt. Small sized sets of prototypical views can be generated by means of a simple and efficient heuristic procedure. For fast recognition and pose estimation usually a single view is sufficient. Discrimination experiments demonstrate the system's ability to separate similar objects. An object's pose can be estimated using a vector of selected similarity measures as input for a pose estimator.