High-volume point cloud data simplification based on decomposed graph filtering

Abstract

Recent studies on three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data (PCD) simplification have played significant roles in computer-aided models for alleviating computational and storage burden. However, existing simplification methods are not suitable for the high-volume PCD with billions of point number, especially in construction industry. In this paper, a decomposed simplification method is developed to handle the high-volume buildings' PCD. Based on the divide-and-conquer philosophy, the new decomposed approach effectively reduces the memory usage. In the proposed approach, PCD is divided into several subsets according to the relationship of natural neighbor, and decomposed graph filtering with adaptive resampling rate is designed. It can be proved that the decomposed simplification results have no variance in the comparison with the optimal simplification of entire PCD. Verification experiments are conducted on different sizes of PCD, which indicate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.