Filling holes on the surface of 3D point clouds based on tangent plane of hole boundary points

Abstract

Filling the holes of a triangular mesh has been studied for many years in the field of geometric modeling. This research is one of the reconstructing steps of a triangular mesh (or called refinement of a mesh) in order to improve the quality of a 3D triangular surface. With the same idea of hole filling in a mesh, filling in the holes of a 3D point cloud is still a challenge to the researchers. This paper describes a method for filling holes in an elevation surface of 3D point clouds structured in a 3D grid. The novelty of the method is processed directly on the 3D point clouds consisting of two steps. In the first step, we determine the boundary of hole. In the second step, we fill the holes based on the computation of tangent plane for each boundary point. Following clock-wise direction on the hole boundary, we compute and insert missing points on each tangent plane. This process is repeated and refined ring by ring from the hole boundary to the inside of the hole. The obtained results show that the processing time of algorithm is very fast, the output surfaces preserve their initial shapes and local curvatures.