FAST SEGMENTATION OF RANGE IMAGES INTO PLANAR REGIONS BY SCAN LINE GROUPING

A novel technique is presented for rapid partitioning of surfaces in range images into planar patches. The method extends and improves Pavlidis' algorithm (1976), proposed for segmenting images from electron microscopes. The new method is based on region growing where the segmentation primitives are scan line grouping features instead of individual pixels. We use a noise variance estimation to automatically set thresholds so that the algorithm can adapt to the noise conditions of different range images. The proposed algorithm has been tested on real range images acquired by two different range sensors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is fast and robust.