Techniques for the reconstruction of quadric surfaces (cones and cylinders) from disparity measurements obtained by a stereo vision system are presented. For the initial estimation of the geometrical parameters of cones, a regression based approach is adopted from [Newman, Flynn, and Jain, CVGIP: Image Understanding, Vol. 58, pp. 235-249]. A new method based on surface normal estimation is developed for the cylindrical case. For the refinement of the parameter estimates, the Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least squares algorithm is used as in [Flynn and Jain, Proc. 1988 IEEE Comput. Soc. Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 261-267] but two mistaken formulas (one for a cone and the same for a cylinder) are corrected. The prior approaches for quadrics in stereo vision have been more or less approximative. Our contribution is to fit the exact quadric shape to disparity data using the existing methods for range data. The disparity space offers a convenient frame to analyze the differences between the measurements and the reconstructed model.

Date Published: 21 September 1994
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 2298, Applications of Digital Image Processing XVII, (21 September 1994); doi: 10.1117/12.186573

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2298:
Applications of Digital Image Processing XVII
Andrew G. Tescher, Editor(s)