2017/07/03 by Andrew Spek, Spek, Andrew, Wai Ho Li +3
Engineering · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1707.00385
openalex publication_date 2017/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Estimation of surface curvature from range data is important for a range of tasks in computer vision and robotics, object segmentation, object recognition and robotic grasping estimation. This work presents a fast method of robustly computing accurate metric principal curvature values from noisy point clouds which was implemented on GPU. In contrast to existing readily available solutions which first differentiate the surface to estimate surface normals and then differentiate these to obtain curvature, amplifying noise, our method iteratively fits parabolic quadric surface patches to the data. Additionally previous methods with a similar formulation use less robust techniques less applicable to a high noise sensor. We demonstrate that our method is fast and provides better curvature estimates than existing techniques. In particular we compare our method to several alternatives to demonstrate the improvement.