Shape recovery methods for visual inspection

The advancement of three-dimensional machine vision is closely related to the development of robust and efficient shape recovery methods. The author addresses the recovery problem associated with three different classes of surfaces: (a) specular surfaces; (b) surfaces with varying reflectance; and (c) rough and textured surfaces. Three realtime machine vision systems have been developed based on these results. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods and systems are applicable to a variety of visual inspection problems