Fast planar segmentation of depth images

One of the major challenges for applications dealing with the 3D concept is the real-time execution of the algorithms. Besides this, for the indoor environments, perceiving the geometry of surrounding structures plays a prominent role in terms of application performance. Since indoor structures mainly consist of planar surfaces, fast and accurate detection of such features has a crucial impact on quality and functionality of the 3D applications, e.g. decreasing model size (decimation), enhancing localization, mapping, and semantic reconstruction. The available planar-segmentation algorithms are mostly developed using surface normals and/or curvatures. Therefore, they are computationally expensive and challenging for real-time performance. In this paper, we introduce a fast planar-segmentation method for depth images avoiding surface normal calculations. Firstly, the proposed method searches for 3D edges in a depth image and finds the lines between identified edges. Secondly, it merges all the points on each pair of intersecting lines into a plane. Finally, various enhacements (e.g. filtering) are applied to improve the segmentation quality. The proposed algorithm is capable of handling VGA-resolution depth images at a 6 FPS frame-rate with a single-thread implementation. Furthermore, due to the multi-threaded design of the algorithm, we achieve a factor of 10 speedup by deploying a GPU implementation.