Range-image: Incorporating sensor topology for lidar point cloud processing

This paper proposes a novel methodology for lidar point cloud processing that takes advantage of the implicit topology of various lidar sensors to derive 2D images from the point cloud while bringing spatial structure to each point. The interest of such a methodology is then proved by addressing the problems of segmentation and disocclusion of mobile objects in 3D lidar scenes acquired using street-based Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS). Most of the existing lines of research tackle those problems directly in the 3D space. This work promotes an alternative approach by using this image representation of the 3D point cloud, taking advantage of the fact that theproblem of disocclusion has been intensively studied in the 2D image processing community over the past decade. Using the image derived from the sensor data by exploiting the sensor topology, a semi-automatic segmentation procedure based on depth histograms is presented. Then, a variational image inpainting technique is introduced to reconstruct the areas that are occluded by objects. Experiments and validation on real data prove the effectiveness of this methodology both in terms of accuracy and speed.