TOWARDS OBJECT DRIVEN FLOOR PLAN EXTRACTION FROM LASER POINT CLOUD

Abstract. During the last years, the demand for indoor models has increased for various purposes. As a provisional step to proceed towards higher dimensional indoor models, powerful and flexible floor plans can be utilised. Therefore, several methods have been proposed that provide automatically generated floor plans from laser point clouds. The prevailing methodology seeks to attain semantic enhancement of a model (e.g. the identification and labelling of its components) built upon already reconstructed (a priori) geometry. In contrast, this paper demonstrates preliminary research on the possibility to directly incorporate semantic knowledge, which is itself derived from the raw data during the extraction, into the geometric modelling process. In this regard, we propose a new method to automatically extract floor plans from raw point clouds. It is based on a hierarchical space partitioning of the data, integrated with primitive selection actuated by object detection. First, planar primitives corresponding to vertical architectural structures are extracted using M-estimator SAmple and Consensus (MSAC). The set of the resulting line segments are refined by a selection process through a novel door detection algorithm, considering optimization of prior information and fitness to the data. The selected lines are used as hyperlines to partition the space into enclosed areas. Finally, a floor plan is extracted from these partitions by Minimum Description Length (MDL) hypothesis ranking. The algorithm is applied on a real mobile laser scanner dataset and the results are evaluated both in terms of door detection and consecutive floor plan extraction.