Detection of geometric temporal changes in point clouds

Detecting geometric changes between two 3D captures of the same location performed at different moments is a critical operation for all systems requiring a precise segmentation between change and no-change regions. Such application scenarios include 3D surface reconstruction, environment monitoring, natural events management and forensic science. Unfortunately, typical 3D scanning setups cannot provide any one-to-one mapping between measured samples in static regions: in particular, both extrinsic and intrinsic sensor parameters may vary over time while sensor noise and outliers additionally corrupt the data. In this paper, we adopt a multi-scale approach to robustly tackle these issues. Starting from two point clouds, we first remove outliers using a probabilistic operator. Then, we detect the actual change using the implicit surface defined by the point clouds under a Growing Least Square reconstruction that, compared to the classical proximity measure, offers a more robust change/no-change characterization near the temporal intersection of the scans and in the areas exhibiting different sampling density and direction. The resulting classification is enhanced with a spatial reasoning step to solve critical geometric configurations that are common in man-made environments. We validate our approach on a synthetic test case and on a collection of real data sets acquired using commodity hardware. Finally, we show how 3D reconstruction benefits from the resulting precise change/no-change segmentation.