Master Thesis - Fachbereich Informatik

Acknowledgments
First of all, I would like to thank my thesis advisor Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Herpers and Prof.
Dr. Dietmar Reinert for guiding this work and for their helpful input and discussions.
Many thanks to the company DSG-Canusa for funding this work and for supporting me
in designing the hardware setup. A special thanks to Thomas Schminke, Markus Greßnich,
Manfred Hirn, Andreas Dederichs and Klaus Lanzerath.
During my thesis work, several people, fellow students and friends working in the Computer
Vision Lab at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences provided me with
useful comments and ideas. Particularly, I would like to thank Stefan Hahne, Axel Hau,
Bernd Göbel, Ingmar Burak, Christian Becker and Nils Neumaier, who also modeled the
nice 3D figures. I also thank Philipp Wegner and Patrick Schmitz for assisting me during
the experiments and for measuring several hundreds of heat shrink tubes by hand.
Furthermore, I appreciate the time I could spent at the York University in Toronto
and at the Centre of Vision Research, Toronto. Thanks to all professors and students
who contributed to my interest in Computer Vision. A special thanks goes to Markus
Enzweiler. We really had a great time not only during our stay in Canada and always
kept in touch for productive discussions.
Many thanks to Gemma Adcock from New Zealand, who gave me great native support
in writing my thesis in English.
Finally, I would like to thank Steffi for being so understanding during stressful times.
iii