Development of Compact Vision Sensor by Fusion of 2-D Intensity Image and Sparse Range Image

Abstract

This paper describes a three dimensional vision sensor which fuses a sparse range data obtained by the FG vision sensor and 2-D intensity images by a CCD camera of the sensor.
The range image obtained by the sensor is precise, but coarsely sampled data. Therefore, we cannot recognize a 3-D object densely. On the other hand, we can get features (such as outlines, edge lines, vertices, and so on) from 2-D intensity image, because intensity images are high density data equivalent to the camera resolution. However, we cannot determine their location on 3-D space without some restrictions from only intensity images. To solve this problem, we propose the method that can recognize 3-D Polyheral object precisely and densely by fusing both information obtained from sparse range image and abstracted 2-D image. As a result, this vision sensor is small and light enough to be fitted to a robot hand.