Stochastic surface mesh reconstruction

Abstract

A generic and practical methodology is presented for 3D surface mesh reconstruction from the terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) derived point clouds. It has two main steps. The first step deals with developing an anisotropic point error model, which is capable of computing the theoretical precisions of 3D coordinates of each individual point in the point cloud. The magnitude and direction of the errors are represented in the form of error ellipsoids. The following second step is focused on the stochastic surface mesh reconstruction. It exploits the previously determined error ellipsoids by computing a point-wise quality measure, which takes into account the semi-diagonal axis length of the error ellipsoid. The points only with the least errors are used in the surface triangulation. The remaining ones are automatically discarded.