Modeling 3D Objects from Stereo Views and Recognizing Them in Photographs

Local appearance models in the neighborhood of salient image features, together with local and/or global geometric constraints, serve as the basis for several recent and effective approaches to 3D object recognition from photographs. However, these techniques typically either fail to explicitly account for the strong geometric constraints associated with multiple images of the same 3D object, or require a large set of training images with much overlap to construct relatively sparse object models. This paper proposes a simple new method for automatically constructing 3D object models consisting of dense assemblies of small surface patches and affine-invariant descriptions of the corresponding texture patterns from a few (7 to 12) stereo pairs. Similar constraints are used to effectively identify instances of these models in highly cluttered photographs taken from arbitrary and unknown viewpoints. Experiments with a dataset consisting of 80 test images of 9 objects, including comparisons with a number of baseline algorithms, demonstrate the promise of the proposed approach.