Supervoxel-Based Region Growing Segmentation for Point Cloud Data

Point cloud segmentation is a crucial fundamental step in 3D reconstruction, object recognition and scene understanding. This paper proposes a supervoxel-based point cloud segmentation algorithm in region growing principle to solve the issues of inaccurate boundaries and nonsmooth segments in the existing methods. To begin with, the input point cloud is voxelized and then pre-segmented into sparse supervoxels by flow constrained clustering, considering the spatial distance and local geometry between voxels. Afterwards, plane fitting is applied to the over-segmented supervoxels and seeds for region growing are selected with respect to the fitting residuals. Starting from pruned seed patches, adjacent supervoxels are merged in region growing style to form the final segments, according to the normalized similarity measure that integrates the smoothness and shape constraints of supervoxels. We determine the values of parameters via experimental tests, and the final results show that, by voxelizing and pre-segmenting the point clouds, the proposed algorithm is robust to noises and can obtain smooth segmentation regions with accurate boundaries in high efficiency.