Object Identification from Parallel Light Stripes

In this paper, an algorithm for identifying an object from a set of known objects is presented and justified. The novelty of this algorithm, called Mask, for object identification is in its use of three-dimensional data which has been obtained from projection of parallel laser light planes. The knowledge that laser light planes are parallel to each other allows automatic discovery of two constraints from the three-dimensional data. The first constraint is based on colinearity between various points and the second constraint on coplanarity between various segments of the three-dimensional data. These automatically derived constraints, then, are used by Mask in a tree search algorithm for object identification. Mask has been implemented in Prolog and sample applications to various objects are presented.