We present a robust approach for reconstructing the main architectural structure of complex indoor environments given a set of cluttered 3D input range scans. Our method uses an efficient occlusion-aware process to extract planar patches as candidate walls, separating them from clutter and coping with missing data, and automatically extracts the individual rooms that compose the environment by applying a diffusion process on the space partitioning induced by the candidate walls. This diffusion process, which has a natural interpretation in terms of heat propagation, makes our method robust to artifacts and other imperfections that occur in typical scanned data of interiors. For each room, our algorithm reconstructs an accurate polyhedral model by applying methods from robust statistics. We demonstrate the validity of our approach by evaluating it on both synthetic models and real-world 3D scans of indoor environments
We describe an efficient technique for out-of-core construction and accurate view-dependent visualization of very large surface models. The method uses a regular conformal hierarchy of tetrahedra to spatially partition the model. Each tetrahedral cell contains a precomputed simplified version of the original model, represented using cache coherent indexed strips for fast rendering. The representation is constructed during a fine-to-coarse simplification of the surface contained in diamonds (sets of tetrahedral cells sharing their longest edge). The construction preprocess operates out-of-core and parallelizes nicely. Appropriate boundary constraints are introduced in the simplification to ensure that all conforming selective subdivisions of the tetrahedron hierarchy lead to correctly matching surface patches. For each frame at runtime, the hierarchy is traversed coarse-to-fine to select diamonds of the appropriate resolution given the view parameters. The resulting system can interatively render high quality views of out-of-core models of hundreds of millions of triangles at over 40Hz (or 70M triangles/s) on current commodity graphics platforms.