Finding cylinders in range data

We have investigated the problem of locating cylinders in a depth scan map. The crucial problem is deciding whether a group of scans could arise from the same cylinder. We investigated a number of traditional approaches to this problem. We found significant reliability and accuracy problems in the traditional approaches that involve fitting ellipses to the scan data. As an alternative, we have developed a simple and very robust method for computing the axis of a cylinder based on three scans. This computation provides the basic capability needed to segment the scan data. This report summarizes our experience with several of the methods and describes the new method in detail.