Visibility estimation in point clouds with variable density

Pierre Biasutti (1) , Aurélie Bugeau (1) , Jean-François Aujol (2) , Mathieu Brédif (3)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 IMB - Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux
3 MATIS - Méthodes d'Analyses pour le Traitement d'Images et la Stéréorestitution

Estimating visibility in point clouds has many applications such as visualization, surface reconstruction and scene analysis through fusion of LiDAR point clouds and images. However, most current works rely on methods that require strong assumptions on the point cloud density, which are not valid for LiDAR point clouds acquired from mobile mapping systems, leading to low quality of point visibility estimations. This work presents a novel approach for the estimation of the visibility of a point cloud from a viewpoint. The method is designed to be fully automatic and it makes no assumption on the point cloud density. The visibility of each point is estimated by considering its screen-space neighborhood from the given viewpoint. Our results show that our approach succeeds better in estimating the visibility on real-world data acquired using LiDAR scanners. We evaluate our approach by comparing its results to a new manually annotated dataset, which we make available online.

Mots clés: benchmark; visibility; 3D point cloud; visualization; LiDAR; dataset

Domaines: Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]

Pierre Biasutti, Aurélie Bugeau, Jean-François Aujol, Mathieu Brédif. Visibility estimation in point clouds with variable density. International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications (VISAPP), Feb 2019, Prague, Czech Republic. ⟨hal-01812061v2⟩