Contour Tracking Method Suitable for 3D Natural Shapes and Its Application to Support Drawing Map of Remains

Abstract

A 3D point cloud is a representation of a 3D space with a large number of discrete coordinate

data obtained by laser or photogrammetric surveying. The processing of 3D point clouds enables us

to directly analyze features in 3D space, which is expected to have various applications. A contour tracking

method for 3D point clouds has been proposed by Daniel et al. This method is intended for surface

segmentation and surface meshing, and performs surface fitting on a set of 3D points that show geometric

shapes, and traces contours on a set of points projected on the edges that exist at the boundaries between

surfaces. However, this method is not necessarily suitable for contour tracking of edges of 3D point clouds

that represent general natural shapes, such as those obtained at surveying sites. In this work, we propose

a new method of contour tracking for edges of 3D point clouds representing natural shapes, and show its

effectiveness on drawing map of the remains through experiments on actual remain data.