Rigidity checking method and apparatus with the result freed from the

Abstract

A rigidity checking method and apparatus is presented. A composite feature vector is first generated by combining three pairs of coordinates obtained for a feature point of a target object from three pictures of the target object. A covariance matrix of the compound feature vector is calculated by finding a product of a variance matrix comprising a variance of each element of the compound feature vector and the transposed matrix of the variance matrix. The rigidity of the target object is calculated by using the element of the covariance matrix and compared with a predetermined threshold to determine whether the target object is a rigid body. Thus, a rigidity checking is directly achieved from the joint distribution of feature points in the three pictures without assuming the coefficients of a set of constraint equations.