Single-step Planar Surface Extraction from Range Images

The volume of raw range image data that is required to represent just a single scene can be extensive; hence direct interpretation of range images can incur a very high computational cost. Range image segmentation and feature extraction have been identified as mechanisms to produce more compact scene representations and hence enable less costly scene interpretation for applications such as object recognition and robot navigation. We present a new approach to multi-scale edge and planar surface detection in range images that can be used directly with any range data, regardless of whether the data have regular or irregular spatial distribution. The approach is evaluated with respect to accuracy of both edge location and planar surface representation. The contribution of our approach is that only a single application of our operator is necessary to both extract object edges and determine representations of the corresponding planar object surfaces.