Detecting unstructured elements in 3D scanned scenes

Abstract

This paper presents a technique for detecting unstructured areas in scanned 3D data. For many applications, outdoor 3D scanned data has to be filtered in order to eliminate undesirable artefacts, such as wires, vegetation, small objects, etc. Usually, this task is done manually, but it would be desirable to provide an automatic tool to reduce the preprocessing cost. The proposed technique, which consists in two stages, based on anisotropic diffusion and plane regression respectively, allows us to select most of the uninteresting data. It also has been shown good results with real data.