Pose estimation of multi-part curved objects

We show that alignment-like techniques can be used for the pose estimation of a large class of structured curved objects. We demonstrate that although it is difficult to isolate distinguished points on the outlines of such objects, high-level descriptions, extracted from a 2D image, based on a part-based formalism using sub-classes of generalized cylinders provide means to establish quasi-invariant correspondences between image and model shapes. We describe the method and show several results on real images