Viewpoint independent representation and recognition of polygonal faces in 3-D

The recognition of polygons in 3-D space is an important task in robot vision. Two particular problems are addressed in the paper. First a new set of local shape descriptors for polygons are proposed that are invariant under affine transformation. Furthermore, they are complete in the sense that they allow the reconstruction of any polygon in 3-D space from three consecutive vertices. The second problem discussed in this paper is the recognition of 2-D polygonal objects under affine transformation and the presence of partial occlusion. A recognition procedure that is based on the matching of edge length ratios is introduced using a simplified version of the standard dynamic programming procedure commonly employed for string matching. The algorithm is conceptually very simple, easy to implement and has a low computational complexity. It is in a set of experiments that the method is reliable and robust