Scene interpretation based on boundary representations of stereo images

The problem of detecting occluding and ridge edges is solved for objects with planar surfaces, using stereo vision that is based on directional boundary segments of regions in a pair of stereo images. Methods are proposed to detect occlusions in which occluding edges are explicitly identified: to classify the other unidentified edges as either occluding or ridge edges, using the explicitly occluding edges to classify ridge edges further as convex, concave, or flat (paint or shadow) edges, based on the surface normals of both sides of the edges; and to classify the space of the scene into free, occupied, or uninterpretable real surfaces