Next best view of range sensor

To determine the location of the best next sensor position has always been an important issue in the areas of machine navigation, object recognition, and automatic inspection. A range scanner is a device that sense 3-D positions in a scene and return an array of distance values. Using the depth information from range data to the next best view problem will offer both an accurate and sometimes cost effective tool for the acquisition of 3-D data. A new concept presented in this paper is giving a range image (or a sequence of range images), how to find the next position and orientation of the sensor, that the unseen parts of the scene (or object) can be observed most, when no a priori geometrical information about the scene is available