Segmentation of range images: an orthogonal moment-based integrated approach

A new approach to range image segmentation is presented. The proposed approach involves two phases in which the region and edge information detected using a set of orthogonal Zernike moment-based operators are combined to provide robust segmentation of range images. In the first phase, each range image point is characterized by the surface normal vector and the depth value at that point. A surface feature-based clustering of range image points yields its initial region-based segmentation. This initial segmentation phase often produces oversegmented images. In the second phase of the proposed technique, the oversegmented image is resegmented by appropriately merging adjacent regions using the edge information to produce final segmentation. One attractive characteristic of the proposed technique is that the same set of three moment-based operators is used to extract both surface and edge features. Thus only three convolution operations are needed at an image point to compute all the desired surface and edge features associated with that point. The performances of the proposed Zernike moment-based operators in surface and edge feature detection are theoretically analyzed