The D-FCM partitioned D-BSP tree for massive point cloud data access and rendering

Abstract

The spatial partitioning of massive point cloud data involves dividing the space into a multi-tree structure step by step, so as to achieve the purpose of fast access and to render the point cloud. The current methods are based on spatial regularity and equal division, which is not consistent with the irregular and non-uniform distribution of most point clouds. This paper presents a directional fuzzy c-means (D-FCM) method for irregular spatial partitioning. The distance metric is weighted by a direction coefficient, which is determined by the eigenvalue of the point cloud. The orientation of each node is adaptively calculated by principal component analysis of the point cloud, and Karhunen-Loeve (KL) transform is applied to the points coordinates in node. A binary space partitioning (BSP) tree structure is used to partition the point cloud data node by node, and a directional BSP (D-BSP) tree is formed. The D-BSP tree structure was tested with point clouds of 0.1 million to over 2 billion points (up to 60GB). The experimental results showed that the D-BSP tree can ensure that the bounding boxes are close to the actual spatial distribution of the point cloud, it can completely expand along the spatial configuration of the point cloud without generating unnecessary partitioning, and it can achieve a higher rendering speed with less memory requirement.