Real-time 3D visual sensor for robust object recognition

This paper presents a novel 3D measurement system, which yields both depth and color information in real time, by calibrating a time-of-flight and two CCD cameras. The problem of occlusions is solved by the proposed fast occluded-pixel detection algorithm. Since the system uses two CCD cameras, missing color information of occluded pixels is covered by one another. We also propose a robust object recognition using the 3D visual sensor. Multiple cues, such as color, texture and 3D (depth) information, are integrated in order to recognize various types of objects under varying lighting conditions. We have implemented the system on our autonomous robot and made the robot do recognition tasks (object learning, detection, and recognition) in various environments. The results revealed that the proposed recognition system provides far better performance than the previous system that is based only on color and texture information.