Fast incremental clustering and representation of a 3D point cloud sequence with planar regions

An incremental clustering technique to partition 3D point clouds into planar regions is presented in this paper. The algorithm works in real-time on unknown and noisy data, without any initial assumption. An iterative cluster growing technique is proposed in order to correctly classify a flow of 3D points and to merge close regions. The computational efficiency of the approach is achieved by using an Incremental Principal Component Analysis (IPCA) technique, and with the adoption of a compact geometrical representation based on the concave-hull computation of each cluster. This solution adds a more realistic representation of the observed environment and reduces the number of points needed to identify the cluster shape. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been validated with both synthetic and real data sets. © 2012 IEEE.