Recovery of Volumetric Descriptions of Objects from a Range Image

The Case for Solids of Revolution

Abstract

Many man-made objects such as industrial parts are partially constructed of surfaces of revolution, as well as planar surfaces. This paper studies the problem of finding surfaces of revolution in range data and proposes an approach based on the fact that at least one of two focal surfaces for a surface of revolution degenerates into the axis of rotation. For each point in the range image the centers of principal curvature, which construct the focal surface, are obtained from the first and second partial derivatives of the image and Hough transform is used to detect the axes of rotation by finding the centers which lie on straight lines in space. Finally, the revolution solid is volumetrically determined by estimating the radius function of cross section along each axis. The proposed method can be used where occlusion or truncation is a problem because it does not require the entire surfaces to be visible. The experiments have been successfully carried out using real range data.