Point-of-interest detection for range data

Point-of-interest detection is a way of reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed in a certain application and is widely used in 2D image analysis. In 2D image analysis, point-of-interest detection is usually related to extraction of local descriptors for object recognition, classification, registration or pose estimation. In analysis of range data however, some local descriptors have been published in the last decade or so, but most of them do not mention any kind of point-of-interest detection. We here show how to use an extended Harris detector on range data and discuss variants of the Harris measure. All described variants of the Harris detector for 3D should also be usable in medical image analysis, but we focus on the range data case. We do present a performance evaluation of the described variants of the Harris detector on range data.