Patent ID: 8165403

Claim:
A method for determining a pose of an object, wherein the pose is a position and orientation of the object, wherein the object is specular, comprising: acquiring a plurality of sets of images of the object with a camera, wherein the object has a curved region, wherein a degree of curvature of the curved region is r D ⪡ 0.01 , where r is a radius of the curved region at particular points and D is a distance between a center of the curved region and the camera, and wherein the camera is at a different point of view for each set of images, and wherein each image in each set is acquired while the scene is illuminated from a different direction; extracting a set of features from each image, wherein the features correspond to the particular points on the curved region having normals towards the camera; fitting a parametric shape to the particular points for each image; and applying geometric constraints to the parametric shape, to determine the pose of the object.