Real-time estimation of planar surfaces in arbitrary environments using microsoft kinect sensor

Abstract

We propose an algorithm, suitable for real-time robot applications, for modeling and reconstruction of complex scenes. The environment is seen as a collection of planes and the algorithm extracts in real time their parameters from the 3D point cloud provided by the Kinect sensor. The execution speed of the procedure depends on the desired reconstruction quality and on the complexity of the surroundings. Implementation issues are discussed and experiments on a real scene are included. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.