Segmentation of Range Images as the Search for the Best Description of the Scene in Terms of Geometric Primitives

Segmentation of range images has long been considered in computer vision as an important but extremely difficult problem. In this paper we present a new paradigm for the segmentation of range images into piecewise continuous patches. Data aggregation is performed via model recovery in terms of variable-order bi-variate polynomials using iterative regression. All the recovered models are potential candidates for the final description of the data. Selection of the models is achieved through a maximization of quadratic Boolean problem. The procedure can be adapted to prefer certain kind of descriptions (one which describes more data points, or has smaller error, or has lower order model). We have developed a fast optimization procedure for model selection. The major novelty of the approach is in combining model extraction and model selection in a dynamic way. Partial recovery of the models is followed by the optimization (selection) procedure where only the "best" models are allowed to develop further. The results obtained in this way are comparable with the results obtained when using the selection module only after all the models are fully recovered, while the computational complexity is significantly reduced. We test the procedure on several real range images.