Recognition of one Class of Quadrics from 3D Point Clouds

Within cyber physical production systems 3D vision as a source of information from real-world provides enormous possibilities. While the hardware of contemporary 3D scanners is characterized by high speed along with high resolution and accuracy, there is a lack of real-time on-line data processing algorithms that would give certain elements of intelligence to the sensory system. Critical elements of data processing software are efficient, real-time applicable methods for fully automatic recognition of high level geometric primitives from point cloud (surface segmentation and fitting). This paper presents a method for recognition of one class of quadrics from 3D point clouds, in particular for recognition of cylinders, elliptical cylinders and ellipsoids. The method is based on the properties of scatter matrix during direct least squares fitting of ellipsoids. Presented recognition procedure can be employed for segmentation of regions with G1 or higher continuity, and this is its comparative advantage to similar methods. The applicability of the method is illustrated and experimentally verified using two case studies. First case study refers to a synthesized, and the second to a real-world scanned point cloud.