Analysis of indoor environments by range images

In this paper we present a reliable method to derive the differences between indoor environments using the comparison of high-resolution range images. Samples belonging to different acquisitions are firstly reduced preserving the topology of the scenes and then registered in the same system of reference through an iterative least-squares algorithm, aided by a deletion mask, whose assignment is the removal of implicit errors due to the different points of view of each orthographic acquisition. Finally the analysis of the exact range measures returns an intuitive difference map that allows the fast detection of the positions of the altered regions within the scenes. Numerical experiments are presented to prove the capability of the method for the comparison of scenes regardless the resolution of the sensor and the input noise level of such measurements. © 2013 IEEE.