Surface profile description: reliable geometric primitive extraction

This paper is concerned with the reliability of a shape description recovered from a set of scattered measurements. The recovering process of the description should not introduce a bias that is caused by specific acquisition conditions such as the presence of spurious measurements and the relative position of the sensor with respect to the object. Moreover, the recovered description should be stable for a sampling variation. While the fitting stage is based on a measurement error model which takes into account the sensor´s viewpoint, the stability with sampling is tested by perturbing an hypothesized section. The validity of the approach is demonstrated by extracting reliable estimates of polynomial sections (lines, conics) from surface profile range data obtained from one or several viewpoints