Abstract : Recent progress in 3D sensor devices and in semantic mapping allows to build very rich HD 3D maps very useful for autonomous navigation and localization. However , these maps are particularly huge and require important memory capabilities as well computational resources. In this paper, we propose a new method for summarizing a 3D map (Mesh) as a set of compact spheres in order to facilitate its use by systems with limited resources (smartphones, robots, UAVs, ...). This vision-based summarizing process is applied in a fully automatic way using jointly photometric, geometric and semantic information of the studied environment. The main contribution of this research is to provide a very compact map that maximizes the significance of its content while maintaining the full visibility of the environment. Experimental results in summarizing large-scale 3D map demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and evaluate the performance of the algorithm.
