#spatialcomputing #realtime #automation #robotics #ar #computervision #surface #fitting #pointcloud #curvature #differentialgeometry #linearalgebra #leastsquares #odf #orthogonaldistancefitting
How to accurately estimate in real-time the shape, size, position, rotation of an object surface from point cloud (measurement points) has been the Holy Grail of computer vision.
The run-time library is now available as a middleware of a file size of about 300 KB.
Locally differentiable surfaces can be classified as one of the 4 surface types:
planar
parabolic
elliptic
hyperbolic.
Most man-made object surfaces are composed of planes, spheres, cylinders, cones, and tori:
Plane is planar
Sphere is elliptic
Cylinder is parabolic
Cone is parabolic
Torus is locally elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic (seldom).
Then, through the local curvature analysis of the point cloud measured, we can assume the local shape of the measurement object:
Planar --> plane
Parabolic --> cylinder or cone
Elliptic --> sphere or torus
Hyperbolic --> torus.
By investigating the shape parameters of cone (vertex angle) and torus (mean and tube radius) fitted to the point cloud
measured, we can refine the object shape type between sphere, cylinder, cone, and torus.