Fuzzy scene matching in LADAR imagery

This paper examines object pair matching within LADAR (laser radar) imagery. By manipulating the three-dimensional data contained within a LADAR range image, it is possible to create a version of the scene as seen from above. In the transformed view, a fuzzy region represents each object, and the spatial relationship between two objects is represented by a force histogram. Matching two scenes then comes down to comparing force histograms. Each comparison gives a degree of similarity between the two object pairs considered, as well as an assessment of the pose parameters. These values can finally be combined to find a correct scene matching. Experiments on synthetic data as well as on real data demonstrate the applicability of our approach.