Ensemble of shape functions for 3D object classification

This work addresses the problem of real-time 3D shape based object class recognition, its scaling to many categories and the reliable perception of categories. A novel shape descriptor for partial point clouds based on shape functions is presented, capable of training on synthetic data and classifying objects from a depth sensor in a single partial view in a fast and robust manner. The classification task is stated as a 3D retrieval task finding the nearest neighbors from synthetically generated views of CAD-models to the sensed point cloud with a Kinect-style depth sensor. The presented shape descriptor shows that the combination of angle, point-distance and area shape functions gives a significant boost in recognition rate against the baseline descriptor and outperforms the state-of-the-art descriptors in our experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset of real-world objects in table scene contexts with up to 200 categories.