Optimal local searching for fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking in highly cluttered backgrounds.

Edge-based tracking is a fast and plausible approach for textureless 3D object tracking, but its robustness is still very challenging in highly cluttered backgrounds due to numerous local minima. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel method for fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking in highly cluttered backgrounds. The proposed method is based on optimal local searching of 3D-2D correspondences between a known 3D object model and 2D scene edges in an image with heavy background clutter. In our searching scheme, searching regions are partitioned into three levels (interior, contour, and exterior) with respect to the previous object region, and confident searching directions are determined by evaluating candidates of correspondences on their region levels; thus, the correspondences are searched among likely candidates in only the confident directions instead of searching through all candidates. To ensure the confident searching direction, we also adopt the region appearance, which is efficiently modeled on a newly defined local space (called a searching bundle). Experimental results and performance evaluations demonstrate that our method fully supports fast and robust textureless 3D object tracking even in highly cluttered backgrounds.

Gradient response maps for real-time detection of textureless objects.

We present a method for real-time 3D object instance detection that does not require a time-consuming training stage, and can handle untextured objects. At its core, our approach is a novel image representation for template matching designed to be robust to small image transformations. This robustness is based on spread image gradient orientations and allows us to test only a small subset of all possible pixel locations when parsing the image, and to represent a 3D object with a limited set of templates. In addition, we demonstrate that if a dense depth sensor is available we can extend our approach for an even better performance also taking 3D surface normal orientations into account. We show how to take advantage of the architecture of modern computers to build an efficient but very discriminant representation of the input images that can be used to consider thousands of templates in real time. We demonstrate in many experiments on real data that our method is much faster and more robust with respect to background clutter than current state-of-the-art methods.