Plane segmentation is a basic task in the automatic reconstruction of indoor and urban environments from unorganized point clouds acquired by laser scanners. As one of the most common plane-segmentation methods, standard Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) is often used to continually detect planes one after another. However, it suffers from the spurious-plane problem when noise and outliers exist due to the uncertainty of randomly sampling the minimum subset with 3 points. An improved RANSAC method based on Normal Distribution Transformation (NDT) cells is proposed in this study to avoid spurious planes for 3D point-cloud plane segmentation. A planar NDT cell is selected as a minimal sample in each iteration to ensure the correctness of sampling on the same plane surface. The 3D NDT represents the point cloud with a set of NDT cells and models the observed points with a normal distribution within each cell. The geometric appearances of NDT cells are used to classify the NDT cells into planar and non-planar cells. The proposed method is verified on three indoor scenes. The experimental results show that the correctness exceeds 88.5% and the completeness exceeds 85.0%, which indicates that the proposed method identifies more reliable and accurate planes than standard RANSAC. It also executes faster. These results validate the suitability of the method.

Recent developments in laser scanning systems have inspired substantial interest in indoor modeling. Semantically rich indoor models are required in many fields. Despite the rapid development of 3D indoor reconstruction methods for building interiors from point clouds, the indoor reconstruction of multi-room environments with curved walls is still not resolved. This study proposed a novel straight and curved line tracking method followed by a straight line test. Robust parameters are used, and a novel straight line regularization method is achieved using constrained least squares. The method constructs a cell complex with both straight lines and curved lines, and the indoor reconstruction is transformed into a labeling problem that is solved based on a novel Markov Random Field formulation. The optimal labeling is found by minimizing an energy function by applying a minimum graph cut approach. Detailed experiments were conducted, and the results indicate that the proposed method is well suited for 3D indoor modeling in multi-room indoor environments with curved walls.

Thoroughly and accurately identifying various defects on concrete surfaces is crucial to ensure structural safety and prolong service life. However, in actual engineering inspections, the varying shapes and complexities of concrete structural defects challenge the insufficient robustness and generalization of mainstream models, often leading to misdetections and under-detections, which ultimately jeopardize structural safety. To overcome the disadvantages above, an efficient concrete defect detection model called YOLOv11-EMC (efficient multi-category concrete defect detection) is proposed. Firstly, ordinary convolution is substituted with a modified deformable convolution to efficiently extract irregular defect features, and the model’s robustness and generalization are significantly enhanced. Then, the C3k2module is integrated with a revised dynamic convolution module, which reduces unnecessary computations while enhancing flexibility and feature representation. Experiments show that, compared with Yolov11, Yolov11-EMC has improved precision, recall, mAP50, and F1 by 8.3%, 2.1%, 4.3%, and 3% respectively. Results of drone field tests show that Yolov11-EMC successfully lowers false and under-detections while simultaneously increasing detection accuracy, providing a superior methodology to tasks that require identifying tangible flaws in practical engineering applications.

The fast and stable reconstruction of building interiors from scanned point clouds has recently attracted considerable research interest. However, reconstructing long corridors and connected areas across multiple floors has emerged as a substantial challenge. This paper presents a comprehensive segmentation method for reconstructing a three-dimensional (3D) indoor structure with multiple stories. With this method, the over-segmentation that usually occurs in the reconstruction of long corridors in a complex indoor environment is overcome by morphologically eroding the floor space to segment rooms and by overlapping the segmented room-space with partitioned cells via extracted wall lines. Such segmentation ensures both the integrity of the room-space partitions and the geometric regularity of the rooms. For spaces across floors in a multistory building, a peak-nadir-peak strategy in the distribution of points along the z-axis is proposed in order to extract connected areas across multiple floors. A series of experimental tests while using seven real-world 3D scans and eight synthetic models of indoor environments show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

Many studies have used Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) traces to successfully extract segments of road networks because such data can be rapidly updated at a low cost. However, most studies have not focused on extracting intersections, which are indispensable parts of road networks in terms of connectivity. However, extracted intersections often present unsatisfactory precision and misleading connectivity. This study proposes a novel method for extracting road intersections from Global Position System (GPS) trace points and for capturing intersections with better accuracy. The key to improving the geometric accuracy of intersections is to identify the dominant orientations of road segments around intersections, merge similar orientations and maintain independent conflicting orientations. Extracting intersections by aligning the dominant orientations can largely reduce location offsets and road distortions. Experiments are performed to demonstrate the increased accuracy and connectivity of extracted road intersections by the proposed method.

People detection is an important topic in the fields of security, intelligent environments and robotics. Current research on people detection based on a single laser range finder is mostly focused on leg detection. However, in practical environments, where legs are likely to be touching or partially occluded, the current methods suffer from a low detection rate and precision. This paper proposes a multi-type features method for leg detection in 2D laser range data. This method consists of segmentation, through which the laser range data are divided into segments; feature definition and extraction, in which three types of features, including relative distance statistical features, spatial relationship features and nearest neighbor features, are introduced and combined with classic geometric features; and classification, by which a strong classifier is generated using the real AdaBoost algorithm and segments are classified as leg or non-leg. Three 2D laser range data sets are used for the experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed features are robust and effective in detecting both separated legs and touched or partially occluded legs.