The use of relational pyramid representation for view classes in a CAD-to-vision system

A CAD-to-vision system with applications in robot guidance, docking and tracking, and inspection tasks is being developed. The goal of the system is to start with CAD models from a geometric modeling system, convert to models that are appropriate for object recognition in vision, and use these vision models for online vision tasks. The vision models consist of two parts: a three-dimensional component, and a set of two-dimensional structures called view classes, each of which relates back to the three-dimensional component. A view class represents a range of views of the object that have similar features in similar relationships. The definition of a view class, its representation as a relational pyramid, and an algorithm for rapidly selecting the view class that best matches an unknown view of the object are discussed