Surface properties play a very important role in many perception tasks.
Object recognition, navigation, and inspection use surface properties
ex- tensively. Characterizing surfaces at different scales in given data
is often the first and possibly the most important step. Most early
research in ma- chine perception relied on only very coarse
characterization of surfaces. In the last few years, surface
characterization has been receiving due attention. Dr. T. J. Fan is one
of the very few researchers who designed and im- plemented a complete
system for object recognition. He studied issues re- lated to
characterization of surfaces in the context of object recognition, and
then uses the features thus developed for recognizing objects. He uses a
multi-view representation of 3-D objects for recognition, and he devel-
ops techniques for the segmentation of range images to obtain features
for recognition. His matching approach also allows him to recognize
objects from their partial views in the presence of other occluding
objects. The efficacy of his approach is demonstrated in many examples.