Robust and Accurate Plane Segmentation from Point Clouds of Structured Scenes

Abstract

Plane segmentation from the point cloud is an important step in various types of geo-information related to human activities. In this paper, we present a new approach to accurate segment planar primitives simultaneously by transforming it into the best matching issue between the over-segmented super-voxels and the 3D plane models. The super-voxels and its adjacent topological graph are firstly derived from the input point cloud as over-segmented small patches. Such initial 3D plane models are then enriched by fitting centroids of randomly sampled super-voxels, and translating these grouped planar super-voxels by structured scene prior (e.g. orthogonality, parallelism), while the generated adjacent graph will be updated along with planar clustering. To achieve the final super-voxels to planes assignment problem, an energy minimization framework is constructed using the productions of candidate planes, initial super-voxels, and the improved adjacent graph, and optimized to segment multiple consistent planar surfaces in the scenes simultaneously. The proposed algorithms are implemented, and three types of point clouds differing in feature characteristics (e.g. point density, complexity) are mainly tested to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our segmentation method.