Moire topography has the advantage that it just requires a single image, but it cannot discern the fringe order. So, it is difficult to discern the connection among fringes in the case where the fringe orders are not continuous. In our work, an intensity modulated moire is presented. By modulating the transmission of projection and observation grating, the moire pattern whose fringe intensity changes with its order can be produced. The fringe order can be obtained easily from its intensity, so the skeleton of fringes in every order can be extracted to discern the global 3-D shape by intensity analysis. In the same time, we can segment the moire pattern by its fringe order. In every segment, the accurate 3-D shape among the skeletons can be calculated by phase analysis.

We propose a stereo matching algorithm based on shapes and mutual location relationships of granitic patterns of stone surface. This algorithm is divided into two steps. At the first step, granitic patterns which have most similar shapes are matched as an initial matching. At the second step, the other patterns are matched using the relational graph made from relative locations of patterns. This algorithm effectively works for stone statues.

An application of the pose detection using range images usually uses characteristic matching of the geometrical model but this method has two problems: selecting characteristics from range images is difficult; and it is difficult to make a geometrical model for a complicated shape. Previously a parametric eigen-space method was proposed for pose detection. This method makes object recognition and pose detection possible, but this parametric eigen-space method has a problem that intensity-images depend on a variety of light conditions therefore learning images must include variation of light conditions.

We propose a new method to track 3-D motion of an object in real-time, using range images. A very high speed range sensor "Silicon Range Finder" makes it possible to acquire range images at more than 30 frames per second, and rotated to keep the object in the measurable area. Rough but fast results of range image processing controls the angle of the range sensor, and the object centered range images decide the pose of the object. The 3-D CG rendering hardware of the graphics workstation generates range images from the surface model very fast, so it makes the comparison algorithm simple. Tracking speed and accuracies of estimated motion seem to be feasible for the man-machine cooperative systems.

The authors describe a reliable feature-based stereo matching method which determines more reliable pairs of matching edges earlier than less reliable ones and makes use of previous matching results. The contrast of an edge point is used as the measure of reliability of the match because an edge with high contrast has high positional directional accuracy. The decisions on whether there are correspondences between pairs of lower contrast edges or not become easier because previously found more reliable matching results are available to reduce the occurrences of ambiguous matches. Experiments with complicated indoor scenes proved that the proposed method is better than those which do not consider reliability.>

Describes two topics: (1) a reliable feature-based stereo matching method which determines the more reliable matching pairs earlier and then determines the less reliable ones later using the previously obtained results; and (2) a reliable calibration method for small vertical displacements. The feature point is an edge. The contrast, the position, and the direction of the edge are used to evaluate the matching reliability. Experiments with complicated indoor scenes proved that the proposed method is better than conventional methods.>