An algorithm is presented for piecewise planar segmentation of 3D point clouds, which uses spatial subdivision into finite volume elements. For each volume element a local plane is fitted and these planes are grouped to detect bigger planar structures and construct a piecewise planar object model. The algorithm has a higher detection sensitivity for small object planes than a previous global plane detection methods based on RANSAC fitting and plane sweeping. Experimental results are presented for a synthetic dataset, which was used to evaluate the algorithms performance and for a real dataset, which was used to compare it to other methods.

Date Published: 10 January 2003
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5013, Videometrics VII, (10 January 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.473077

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5013:
Videometrics VII
Sabry F. El-Hakim; Armin Gruen; James S. Walton, Editor(s)