Invariants of three-dimensional contours

摘要

This paper presents the invariants of 3-D contours derived from the elliptic Fourier descriptor. A 3-D closed curve can be described by a set of feature ellipses in 3-D space. These feature ellipses have fixed lengths of major and minor axes no matter where the contour is located. Besides, the relative orientations among the ellipses will never change. The derived invariants are implicit functions of these axis lengths as well as the angles defining the relative orientations. These invariants can be used as features for object recognition while 3-D contours can be extracted from range images. Computation of these invariants using simulated and real range images has been performed with results provided.