Analysis and Interpretation of Range Images

Computer vision researchers have been frustrated in their attempts to automatically derive depth information from conventional two-dimensional intensity images. Research on "shape from texture", "shape from shading", and "shape from focus" is still in a laboratory stage and had not seen much use in commercial machine vision systems. A range image or a depth map contains explicit information about the distance from the sensor to the object surfaces within the field of view in the scene. Informati…