Plane detection in 3D point cloud using octree-balanced density down-sampling and iterative adaptive plane extraction

• Published in: IET image processing 2018-09, Vol.12 (9), p.1595-1605
• Main Authors: El-Sayed, Emad, Abdel-Kader, Rehab F, Nashaat, Heba, Marei, Mahmoud
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 3D point cloud; fast octree‐based balanced density down‐sampling technique; image segmentation; iterative adaptive plane extraction technique; iterative methods; object detection; octrees; plane detection; Research Article; stereo image processing; successive iterations
• ISSN: 1751-9659; 1751-9667; 1751-9667
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-ipr.2017.1076

In this paper, a new technique for plane detection from 3D point clouds is proposed. The algorithm depends on two concepts to balance between high-accuracy and fast performance. The first is the use of a new fast octree-based balanced density down-sampling technique to reduce the number of points. The second is the fact that the number of planes in any dataset is much less than the number of the points. Random points are examined to find the 3D planes. To increase the accuracy, the system utilizes an adaptive plane extraction technique to overcome data noise. Initially, the point cloud is subdivided using octree into small cubes with a limited number of points. Then the cubes are down-sampled based on the local density of each cube. The points are explored randomly for finding a planar surface by applying principal component analysis (PCA) on the points’ spherical neighborhood obtained by the down-sampled octree structure. The adaptive plane extraction is used to adjust the plane orientation to find the best position that includes the maximum number of points. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of processing large amounts of data efficiently to produce accurate results that are robust to noise.