To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation ...

Chapter 3: A Feature Saliency Descriptor for Registration and Pose Recovery 40σ(a)σ(b)σ(c)Fig. 3.10. Tensor voting in the case of smooth curves. In the case of nearly registered curveswe will have almost degenerate tensors with the eigen-system ellipses having a small area (a).The ellipse will be also small for curves that are separated vertically by a distance larger thanσ due to the rapid decay of the votes (c). But in the intermediate case of a verticaldisplacement around one σ , we can have a larger saliency due to the vertical tensorcomponents (b). Hence we have a maximum saliency at the wrong position.