A region growing algorithm adapted to bathymetric point clouds

This project focuses on the extraction of plane surfaces and their uncertainty in a bathymetric point cloud. To do so, we propose the Region-Growing-Adapted-to-Bathymetry (RGAB) algorithm. Knowing where plane surfaces on the sea-bottom are is needed in calibration of MBES system. These surfaces are also involved in the computation of error estimators used to validate data acquired by ASV. With the RGAB algorithm, we propose several adaptations to classic region growing to be used with bathymetric point cloud. Indeed, we use a more robust PCA approach to extract local normal vectors and a raster-based analysis on the bathymetric DTM to get seed regions for all plane surfaces.