Adaptive Local Extrema Detection in Range Maps
Curvature calculations are clearly of little to no use for selecting
"interesting" landmark points.
For more on that topic, instead see:
We need a method for highlighting that are likely to be more "interesting".
Most landmarks in range maps are extrema of some type.
They might be local minima (a "pit") or maxima (a "peak"),
like signs in cuneiform tablets, or spiny bone structures, respectively.
They might be valley or roof edges.
The following method has been developed for automatically highlighting
areas of likely interest for further analysis or landmark selection:
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Specify some scale of feature size, specific to the object class.
This should be roughly equal to the dimensions of the features
of interest, and should of course be specified in the units
in which the range map was recorded!
This is called the radius.
-
For each point in the range map, march in the four cardinal
directions of the range map coordinates (up the column, down
the column, left along the row, and right along the row).
In each of these directions, find the closest valid point
for which the 3-D distance from it to the point of interest
is no larger than the radius.
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Consider those four points to specify the left, right, top, and
bottom limits of a rectangular region of possible interest.
(This assumes certain uniformities in the range map which might
not be strictly true around surface discontinuities, or jump
edges, but the assumption is generally a reasonable one).
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Within that rectangular region, find the set of points no
further from the point of interest than the radius, and for
which both (x,y,z) position and local surface normal are known.
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Calculate the centroid and average surface normal for that set.
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Calculate the dot product of the average surface normal with
the vector from the centroid to the point of interest.
This is the height above (or depth below) the local
surface patch, where the patch has a radius
defined by its actual 3-D size.
-
Discard those points not at least 5% of the radius above or
below the local patch.
This method provides promising results, and the computational cost
is not nearly as bad as was feared (granted, this is being done on
a system with a 1.5 GHz CPU clock and 384 MB of RAM).
Below is an example image for a region of a cuneiform tablet
approximately 30x30mm in size, using a maximum patch radius of 0.7mm.
Click here for an archive of similar images for cuneiform tablets
