Volumetric Representation and Sphere Packing of Indoor Space for Three-Dimensional Room Segmentation

Room segmentation is a basic task for the semantic enrichment of point clouds. Recent studies have mainly projected single-floor point clouds to binary images to realize two-dimensional room segmentation. However, these methods have difficulty solving semantic segmentation problems in complex 3D indoor environments, including cross-floor spaces and rooms inside rooms; this is the bottleneck of indoor 3D modeling for non-Manhattan worlds. To make full use of the abundant geometric and spatial structure information in 3D space, a novel 3D room segmentation method that realizes room segmentation directly in 3D space is proposed in this study. The method utilizes volumetric representation based on a VDB data structure and packs an indoor space with a set of compact spheres to form rooms as separated connected components. Experimental results on different types of indoor point cloud datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.