Noise-resistant Unsupervised Object Segmentation in Multi-view Indoor Point Clouds

3D object segmentation in indoor multi-view point clouds (MVPC) is challenged by a high noise level, varying point density and registration artifacts. This severely deteriorates the segmentation performance of state-of-the-art algorithms in concave and highly-curved point set neighborhoods, because concave regions normally serve as evidence for object boundaries. To address this issue, we derive a novel robust criterion to detect and remove such regions prior to segmentation so that noise modelling is not required anymore. Thus, a significant number of inter-object connections can be removed and the graph partitioning problem becomes simpler. After initial segmentation, such regions are labelled using a novel recovery procedure. Our approach has been experimentally validated within a typical segmentation pipeline on multi-view and single-view point cloud data. To foster further research, we make the labelled MVPC dataset public (Bobkov et al., 2017).