Towards semantic scene analysis with time-of-flight cameras

Abstract

For planning grasps and other object manipulation actions in complex environments, 3D semantic information becomes crucial. This paper focuses on the application of recent 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras in the context of semantic scene analysis. For being able to acquire semantic information from ToF camera data, we a) pre-process the data including outlier removal, filtering and phase unwrapping for correcting erroneous distance measurements, and b) apply a randomized algorithm for detecting shapes such as planes, spheres, and cylinders. We present experimental results that show that the robustness against noise and outliers of the underlying RANSAC paradigm allows for segmenting and classifying objects in 3D ToF camera data captured in natural mobile manipulation setups. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.