Selecting Intrinsic Landmarks in Range Scans
John Camp, Ardeshir Goshtasby · 2011
A method to automatically select landmarks in 3-D range scans is proposed.Selected landmarks represent locally unique intrinsic properties of a scanned surface.The selection process requires no user interaction or surface assumptions.It uses the principal curvatures at the range points to select the landmarks.First, a large number of landmarks are generated by fitting a bicubic polynomial surface to points surrounding each range point and calculating the principal curvatures at the range point.Points of locally extremum principal curvature are then considered candidate landmarks.Candidate landmarks that match with landmarks in other scans of the same subject are then selected as the final, stable landmarks.Our main goal in landmark selection is to provide a means to characterize models in a range data base.With several scans of each subject available in the data base, a number of stable landmarks are determined for each subject.The locations and characteristics of the landmarks are used to describe a subject and distinguish it from other subjects.The main contribution of this work is considered to be the selection of unique and stable landmarks in a range scan and generation of a descriptor for each landmark that characterizes the intrinsic properties of the surface in the neighborhood of the landmark.