Identifying rectangles in laser range data for urban scene reconstruction

Abstract

In urban scenes, many of the surfaces are planar and bounded by simple shapes. In a laser scan of such a scene, these simple shapes can still be identified. We present a one-parameter algorithm that can identify point sets on a plane for which a rectangle is a fitting boundary. These rectangles have a guaranteed density: no large part of the rectangle is empty of points. We prove that our algorithm identifies all angles for which a rectangle fits the point set of size n in O ( n log n ) time. We evaluate our method experimentally on 13 urban data sets and we compare the rectangles found by our algorithm to the α ‐ shape as a surface boundary.