Ground Segmentation From Large-Scale Terrestrial Laser Scanner Data of Industrial Environments

In many 3-D perception applications, ground segmentation is a necessary preprocessing phase together with point cloud cleaning and outlier removal. This letter presents a method for ground segmentation in large-scale point clouds of industrial environments acquired using a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). TLSs provide high-precision, dense 3-D measurements, and therefore, such instruments are becoming the state of the art technology for surveying tasks. In contrast to many previous works, where ground segmentation has been investigated using a single scan (e.g., in LiDAR-equipped vehicles), experiments have been performed in large-scale point clouds that contain over 10
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points measured from multiple scan stations. The proposed solution is based on a robust estimation of points belonging to the ground below each scan station and it can be applied even in challenging scenarios with nonplanar regions.