Planar surface segmentation using a color-enhanced hybrid model for RGB-D camera-based indoor mobile mapping point clouds

Abstract. Point clouds acquired by RGB-D camera-based indoor mobile mapping system suffer the problems of being noisy, exhibiting an uneven distribution, and incompleteness, which are the problems that introduce difficulties for point cloud planar surface segmentation. This paper presents a novel color-enhanced hybrid planar surface segmentation model for RGB-D camera-based indoor mobile mapping point clouds based on region growing method, and the model specially addresses the planar surface extraction task over point cloud according to the noisy and incomplete indoor mobile mapping point clouds. The proposed model combines the color moments features with the curvature feature to select the seed points better. Additionally, a more robust growing criteria based on the hybrid features is developed to avoid the generation of excessive over-segmentation debris. A segmentation evaluation process with a small set of labeled segmented data is used to determine the optimal hybrid weight. Several comparative experiments were conducted to evaluate the segmentation model, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed hybrid segmentation method for indoor mobile mapping three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data.