1 Introduction. - 1. 1 The Input. - 1. 2 Issues in Shape Description. - 1. 3 Issues of Recognition. - 1. 4 Questions for the Research. - 1. 5 The Contribution of the Research. - 1. 6 Organization of the Book. - 2 Survey of Previous Work. - 2. 1 Survey of Shape Descriptions. - 2. 2 Survey of Recognition Systems. - 3 Surface Segmentation and Description. - 3. 1 Curvature Properties and Surface Discontinuities. - 3. 2 Detecting Surface Features. - 3. 3 Space Grouping. - 3. 4 Spatial Linking. - 3. 5 Segmentation into Surface Patches. - 3. 6 Surface Fitting. - 3. 7 Object Inference. - 3. 8 Representing Objects by Attributed Graphs. - 4 Object Recognition. - 4. 1 Representation of Models. - 4. 2 Overview of the Matching Process. - 4. 3 Module 1: Screener. - 4. 4 Module 2: Graph Matcher. - 4. 5 Module 3: Analyzer. - 4. 6 Summary. - 5 Experimental Results. - 5. 1 The Models. - 5. 2 A Detailed Case Study. - 5. 3 Results for Other Scenes. - 5. 4 Parallel Versus Sequential Search. - 5. 5 Unknown Objects. - 5. 6 Occlusion. - 6 Discussion and Conclusion. - 6. 1 Discussion. - 6. 2 Contribution. - 6. 3 Future Research. - A Directional Curvatures. - B Surface Curvature. - C Approximation by Quadric Surfaces. Language: English