Patent ID: 9412040
Filing Date: 2016-08-09
CPC Classification: G06K,G06T

Claim Text:
1. A method for extracting planes from three-dimensional (3D) points, comprising the steps of: acquiring a depth map with a 3D sensor, wherein the depth map has a two-dimensional grid of pixels and each pixel has a depth value; back-projecting the depth map to generate a cloud of 3D points; partitioning the 3D points into disjoint regions; constructing a graph of nodes and edges, wherein the nodes represent the regions and the edges represent neighborhood relationships of the regions, wherein each node includes a set of 3D points, a plane fitted to the set of 3D points, and a mean squared error (MSE) of the set of 3D points to the plane; and applying agglomerative hierarchical clustering to the graph to merge regions belonging to a same plane, wherein in each iteration of the agglomerative hierarchical clustering, a node with a minimum MSE is selected and merged with one of neighboring nodes having a minimum merging MSE among the neighboring nodes, wherein the steps are performed in a processor.