A Novel Method of Normal Estimation for 3D Surface Reconstruction

Abstract

A 3D object can be recovered from scanned point data, which requires accurate estimating normal directions of the object surface from the cloud data. Many point cloud processing algorithms rely on the accurate normal as input to generate an accurate 3D surface model. The neighborhood of a data point in its smooth region can be well approximated by a plane. However, the neighborhood of a feature point employed for the normal estimation is isotropic which would enclose points belonging to different surface patches across the sharp feature. In this paper, isotropic neighborhoods are segmented to search anisotropic neighborhoods for the accurate normal estimation. Normals and candidate feature points are first estimated by the principal component analysis (PCA) method. Neighborhoods of the feature point are then mapped into a Gaussian image. A k-means clustering algorithm is then used for the Gaussian image to identify an anisotropic sub-neighborhood for the data point. The normal of the candidate feature point is finally estimated by the anisotropic neighborhood with the PCA method. The proposed method can accurately estimate normal directions while preserving sharp features of the object surface. Applications have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.