Abstract

This paper presents a method for the 3D reconstruction of a piecewise-planar surface from range images, typically laser scans with millions of points. The reconstructed surface is a watertight polygonal mesh that conforms to observations at a given scale in the visible planar parts of the scene, and that is plausible in hidden parts. We formulate surface reconstruction as a discrete optimization problem based on detected and hypothesized planes. One of our major contributions, besides a treatment of data anisotropy and novel surface hypotheses, is a regularization of the reconstructed surface w.r.t. the length of edges and the number of corners. Compared to classical area-based regularization, it better captures surface complexity and is therefore better suited for man-made environments, such as buildings. To handle the underlying higher-order potentials, that are problematic for MRF optimizers, we formulate minimization as a sparse mixed-integer linear programming problem and obtain an approximate solution using a simple relaxation. Experiments show that it is fast and reaches near-optimal solutions.