An efficient outlier removal method for scattered point cloud data

PLoS One. 2018 Aug 2;13(8):e0201280. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201280. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Outlier removal is a fundamental data processing task to ensure the quality of scanned point cloud data (PCD), which is becoming increasing important in industrial applications and reverse engineering. Acquired scanned PCD is usually noisy, sparse and temporarily incoherent. Thus the processing of scanned data is typically an ill-posed problem. In the paper, we present a simple and effective method based on two geometrical characteristics constraints to trim the noisy points. One of the geometrical characteristics is the local density information and another is the deviation from the local fitting plane. The local density based method provides a preprocessing step, which could remove those sparse outlier and isolated outlier. The non-isolated outlier removal in this paper depends on a local projection method, which placing those points onto objects. There is no doubt that the deviation of any point from the local fitting plane should be a criterion to reduce the noisy points. The experimental results demonstrate the ability to remove the noisy point from various man-made objects consisting of complex outlier.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Cloud Computing*
  • Electronic Data Processing / methods*
  • Models, Theoretical*

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (6187012372 and 61472319) (XN, YW); in part by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014M552469); in part by Education Department of Shaanxi Province Key Laboratory Project (17JS099) (XN);in part by Shaanxi Postdoctoral Science Foundation (434015014) (XN); and in part by Shaanxi Natural Science Foundation (2017JQ6023) (XN).