Patent ID: 6888965

Claim:
A method for segmenting a point distribution with numerous points into partial areas, which each exhibit specific structured elements comprising: a) determining for each point ({right arrow over (p)} i ), a feature vector ({right arrow over (x)} i ) whose components are determined based on at least several scaling factors belonging to a respective point; b) determining accompanying feature vectors ({right arrow over (p)} i 1 ) for a predetermined number of reference points ({right arrow over (x)} i 1 ) of the point distribution for which allocation to one of the structural elements is given, and texture classes each corresponding to the underlying structural elements are formed out of the feature vectors of the reference points; c) determining the distance between the respective point and each of the texture classes for all remaining points ({right arrow over (p)} i u ) of the point distribution that are reference points based on a distance measure in the feature space, which fixed by the components on the feature vectors; d) allocating each of the points ({right arrow over (p)} i u ) to a texture class for which a lowest distance was determined; and e) forming partial areas of segmentation out of respective reference points belonging to a texture class and the points allocated in step d).