The main focus for Bastian's work was on the feature-extraction
process for 3D data. One of his contributions was a novel interest
keypoint extraction method that operates on range images generated
from arbitrary 3D point clouds. This method explicitly considers the
borders of the objects identified by transitions from foreground to
background. Bastian also developed a new feature descriptor type,
called NARF (Normal Aligned Radial Features), that takes the same
information into account. Based on these feature matches, Bastian then
worked on a process to create a set of potential object poses and added
spatial verification steps to assure these observations fit the sensor
data.