Design of memory-efficient octree to query large 3D point cloud

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to design a memory-efficient octree for querying large 3D point cloud. The aim has been fulfilled by omitting variables for minimum bounding hexahedral (MBH) of each octree node expressed in C++ language and by passing the re-estimated MBH from parent nodes to child nodes. More efficiency has been reported by two-fold processes of generating pseudo and regular trees to declare an array for all anticipated nodes, instead of using new operator to declare each child node. Experiments were conducted by constructing tree structures and querying neighbor points out of real point cloud composed of more than 18 million points. Compared with conventional methods using MBH information defined in each node, the suggested methods have proved themselves, in spite of existing trade-off between speed and memory efficiency, to be more memory-efficient than the comparative ones and to be practical alternatives applicable to large 3D point cloud.