Applications of Range Image Sensing and Processing

Abstract

In any machine vision problem, one is concerned with analyzing an image so as to produce a description of the image relevant to the task at hand. Most industrial problems have to do with the inspection, manipulation or measurement of three dimensional objects in a three dimensional workspace. Thus, machine vision systems used in these problems are often required to provide geometric descriptions of object and and workspace. The desired descriptions can be formed by implicit or explicit methods. Classical machine vision research seeks to construct three dimensional representation of objects in the field of view implicitly from one or more gray scale luminance images. The central idea behind this approach is that shape characteristics can be inferred from luminance variations observed in the image through the use of a variety of physical, optical and conceptual models. The system forms a description of the scene based on the information from the models, features from the images and control flow supplied by the particular reasoning approach used.