Fast and Robust Edge Extraction in Unorganized Point Clouds

Edges provide important visual information in scene surfaces. The need for fast and robust feature extraction from 3D data is nowadays fostered by the widespread availability of cheap commercial depth sensors and multi-camera setups. This article investigates the challenge of detecting edges in surfaces represented by unorganized point clouds. Generally, edge recognition requires the extraction of geometric features such as normal vectors and curvatures. Since the normals alone do not provide enough information about the geometry of the cloud, further analysis of extracted normals is needed for edge extraction, such as a clustering method. Edge extraction through these techniques consists of several steps with parameters which depend on the density and the scale of the point cloud. In this paper we propose a fast and precise method to detect sharp edge features by analysing the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix that are defined by each point's k-nearest neighbors. Moreover, we evaluate quantitatively, and qualitatively the proposed methods for sharp edge extraction using several dihedral angles and well known examples of unorganized point clouds. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach in the noisier real-world datasets.