Publication

Graph-based segmentation of range data with applications to 3D urban mapping

Conference Article

Conference

European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR)

Edition

4th

Pages

193-198

Doc link

http://www.ecmr09.fer.hr/

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient graph-based algorithm for the segmentation of planar regions out of 3D range maps of urban areas. Segmentation of planar surfaces in urban scenarios is challenging because the data acquired is typically sparsely sampled, incomplete, and noisy. The algorithm is motivated by Felzenszwalb's algorithm to 2D image segmentation (IJCV04), and is extended to deal with non-uniformly sampled 3D range data using an approximate nearest neighbor search. Inter-point distances are sorted in increasing order and this list of distances is traversed growing planar regions that satisfy both local and global variation of distance and curvature. The algorithm runs in O(n log n) and compares favorably with other region growing mechanisms based on Expectation Maximization. Experiments carried out with real data acquired in an outdoor urban environment demonstrate that our approach is well-suited to segment planar surfaces from noisy 3D range data. A pair of applications of the segmented results are shown, a) to derive traversability maps, and b) to calibrate a camera network.

Categories

robots.

Author keywords

3D segmentation, urban robot mapping, plane extraction, camera network calibration

Scientific reference

A.A. Ortega, I. Haddad and J. Andrade-Cetto. Graph-based segmentation of range data with applications to 3D urban mapping, 4th European Conference on Mobile Robots, 2009, Mlini, Croàcia, pp. 193-198, ECMR.