Browsing by Author "Muller, Simon Adriaan"

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    Planar segmentation of range images
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Muller, Simon Adriaan; Brink, Willie; Herbst, B. M.; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Science. Dept. of Mathematical Sciences.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Range images are images that store at each pixel the distance between the sensor and a particular point in the observed scene, instead of the colour information. They provide a convenient storage format for 3-D point cloud information captured from a single point of view. Range image segmentation is the process of grouping the pixels of a range image into regions of points that belong to the same surface. Segmentations are useful for many applications that require higherlevel information, and with range images they also represent a significant step towards complete scene reconstruction. This study considers the segmentation of range images into planar surfaces. It discusses the theory and also implements and evaluates some current approaches found in the literature. The study then develops a new approach based on the theory of graph cut optimization which has been successfully applied to various other image processing tasks but, according to a search of the literature, has otherwise not been used to attempt segmenting range images. This new approach is notable for its strong guarantees in optimizing a specific energy function which has a rigorous theoretical underpinning for handling noise in images. It proves to be very robust to noise and also different values of the few parameters that need to be trained. Results are evaluated in a quantitative manner using a standard evaluation framework and datasets that allow us to compare against various other approaches found in the literature. We find that our approach delivers results that are competitive when compared to the current state-of-the-art, and can easily be applied to images captured with different techniques that present varying noise and processing challenges.