3D object recognition: Representation and matching

Three-dimensional object recognition entails a number of fundamental problems in computer vision: representation of a 3D object, identification of the object from its image, estimation of its position and orientation, and registration of multiple views of the object for automatic model construction. This paper surveys three of those topics, namely representation, matching, and pose estimation. It also presents an overview of the free-form surface matching problem, and describes COSMOS, our framework for representing and recognizing free-form objects. The COSMOS system recognizes arbitrarily curved 3D rigid objects from a single view using dense surface data. We present both the theoretical aspects and the experimental results of a prototype recognition system based on COSMOS.