Extraction of 3D Transform and Scale Invariant Patches from Range Scans

An algorithm is proposed to extract transformation and scale invariant 3D fundamental elements from the surface structure of 3D range scan data. The surface is described by mean and Gaussian curvature values at every data point at various scales and a scale-space search is performed in order to extract the fundamental structures and to estimate the location and the scale of each fundamental structure. The extracted fundamental structures can later be used as nodes in a topological graph where the links between the nodes can be defined as the spatial and geometric relations between the fundamental elements.