Consolidation of low-quality point clouds from outdoor scenes

The emergence of laser/LiDAR sensors, reliable multi-view stereo techniques and more recently consumer depth cameras have brought point clouds to the forefront as a data format useful for a number of applications. Unfortunately, the point data from those channels often incur imperfection, frequently contaminated with severe outliers and noise. This paper presents a robust consolidation algorithm for low-quality point data from outdoor scenes, which essentially consists of two steps: 1) outliers filtering and 2) noise smoothing. We first design a connectivitybased scheme to evaluate outlierness and thereby detect sparse outliers. Meanwhile, a clustering method is used to further remove small dense outliers. Both outlier removal methods are insensitive to the choice of the neighborhood size and the levels of outliers. Subsequently, we propose a novel approach to estimate normals for noisy points based on robust partial rankings, which is the basis of noise smoothing. Accordingly, a fast approach is exploited to smooth noise, while preserving sharp features. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the point clouds from a variety of outdoor scenes.