Source: http://www.google.com/patents/US5724493?dq=7,157,879
Timestamp: 2017-07-26 03:19:42
Document Index: 126577591

Matched Legal Cases: ['art 31', 'art 32', 'art 33', 'art 34', 'art 35', 'arts 31', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'art 20', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'art 34', 'art 32', 'art 351', 'art 352', 'art 353', 'art 354', 'art 355', 'art 356', 'art 357', 'art 352', 'art 357', 'arts 353', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'art 34', 'art 32', 'art 32', 'arts 32', 'art 32', 'art 32']

Patent US5724493 - Method and apparatus for extracting 3D information of feature points - Google PatentsSearch Images Maps Play YouTube News Gmail Drive More »Sign inPatentsThe positions where back-projection lines from a plurality of images pass through a predetermined voxel slice of a 3D space are calculated. Letting a predetermined one of the plurality of images be defined as a basic image and the other remaining images as reference images, information about back-projection...http://www.google.com/patents/US5724493?utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePatent US5724493 - Method and apparatus for extracting 3D information of feature pointsAdvanced Patent SearchTry the new Google Patents, with machine-classified Google Scholar results, and Japanese and South Korean patents.Publication numberUS5724493 APublication typeGrantApplication numberUS 08/571,272Publication dateMar 3, 1998Filing dateDec 12, 1995Priority dateDec 13, 1994Fee statusLapsedPublication number08571272, 571272, US 5724493 A, US 5724493A, US-A-5724493, US5724493 A, US5724493AInventorsEiichi Hosoya, Takeshi Ogura, Mamoru NakanishiOriginal AssigneeNippon Telegraph & Telephone CorporationExport CitationBiBTeX, EndNote, RefManPatent Citations (5), Referenced by (24), Classifications (5), Legal Events (5) External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, EspacenetMethod and apparatus for extracting 3D information of feature points
FIG. 7 illustrates in block form the general construction of a first embodiment of the 3D information extracting apparatus based on the principles of the present invention described above with reference to FIG. 5. As is the case with the basic construction depicted in FIG. 5, the apparatus of this embodiment has the back-projection line passing position calculating part 31, the voting processing part 32, the compare/update processing part 33 and the basic back-projection line information storage part 34. A control part 35 is to control operations and procedures of the individual parts 31, 32, 33 and 34. In this embodiment, to perform the voting and the compare/update processing for each voxel slice St, the voting processing part 32 is provided with a voting part 32A and a voting information storage part 32M that has NX ×NY memory areas respectively corresponding to NX ×NY voxels forming one voxel slice. The 3D information extracting apparatus of this embodiment is supplied with the back-projection line information (i.e., 2D feature points positional information) generated by the back-projection line information generating part 20 in FIG. 1 and outputs 3D coordinates of feature points on the 3D object OB. The operation of the 3D information extracting apparatus of this embodiment will be described below.
In this embodiment, the voting information storage part 32M has storage areas (NX ×NY words) having a one-to-one correspondence with all the voxels (NX ×NY) in one voxel slice St ; the number of back-projection lines passing through each voxel in the voxel slice St (i.e., the voting score) is stored in the storage area corresponding to the voxel. The voting information storage part 32M may be formed by a RAM or the like that has its storage areas addressable just like a 2D arrangement in correspondence with one voxel slice St as schematically shown in FIG. 8, for instance. Assume that the contents of the voting information storage part 32M are all preset to "0s."
FIGS. 9A and 9C show the contents of the basic back-projection line information storage part 34 for four basic back-projection lines L00, L01, L02 and L03 in a certain voxel slice St (Zt =5) before and after the compare/update process in the case where the above-described processes are carried out one after another for each of the voxel slices. FIG. 9B shows the contents of the voting information storage part 32M after the voting process in the voxel slice St (Zt =5). While in this example the size NX ×NY of the voxel slice is shown to be 8×8, it is a matter of course that the processing can similarly be done irrespective of the size of the voxel slice. A description will be given of examples of the process flows in FIGS. 9A, 9B and 9C.
The 3D information extracting apparatus of this embodiment shown in FIG. 11 comprises a controller 35 and a processing block array PBA. The controller 35 is made up of a first data packet input part 351, a second data packet initialization part 352, a first data packet count instruction control part 353, a second data packet update instruction control part 354, a first data packet update instruction control part 355, a data packet transfer instruction control part 356 and a second data packet readout part 357. The processing block array PBA has NX ×NY processing blocks corresponding to NX ×NY voxels in one voxel slice. The initialization part 352 and the readout part 357 are connected via a common data bus CDB to all processing blocks PB, whereas the instruction control parts 353 to 356 are connected via a common control bus CCB to each processing block PB.
This embodiment is a modified form of the FIG. 7 embodiment and differs from the configuration of FIG. 7 with respect to the following points. First, in FIG. 7 the voting information storage part 32M has areas for storing voting scores in correspondence with the total of Nx ×Ny voxels in the voxel slice, whereas in FIG. 19 the voting information storage part 32M has areas for storing only voxel positions through which all the reference back-projection lines pass in the processing of each voxel slice. Second, a field 4D for storing the voting scores V in the processing of each voxel slice is added to each storage area j (where j=0,1, . . . , Fs -1) corresponding to each basic back-projection line L0j in the basic back-projection line information storage part 34 in FIG. 7. In terms of operation, this embodiment differs from the FIG. 7 embodiment in that in the latter the contents of the respective areas in the voting information storage part 32M corresponding to the voxels in a voxel slice through which the back-projection lines pass are incremented by "1", whereas in FIG. 19 all reference back-projection line passing coordinates written in the storage part 32M in the processing of each voxel slice are searched for those which agree with each basic back-projection line passing voxel coordinate and the number of reference back-projection line passing voxel coordinates detected to agree with the basic back-projection line passing voxel is used as the voting score V for the basic back-projection line coordinate, and the voting score V is stored in the field 4D in correspondence with the basic back-projection line.
As described above, according to the 3D information extracting apparatus of FIG. 19, the storage parts 32M and 34 need only to have the areas corresponding to the back-projection lines, so that there is no need of providing the storage areas corresponding to all the quantization points (i.e. voxels) in the 3D voxel space. Hence, the amount of hardware used in this embodiment is appreciably smaller than in the prior art example. The voting information storage part 32M requires less storage capacity than does the voting information storage part 32M in FIG. 7 embodiment which has the areas corresponding to the NX ×NY voxels in the voxel slice. Further, by executing the voting process and the maximum point information compare/update process for each voxel slice, it is not necessary to perform complicated processing of calculating the peak point value in the 3D space after the voting as in the first conventional method; hence the total processing time can be reduced. Besides, the execution of the voting process and the maximum point information compare/update process for each voxel slice eliminates the necessity of performing the voting process twice as in the second conventional method, that is, the voting process needs to be carried out only once for all the back-projection lines--this also contributes to reduction of the processing time.
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