Using Hierarchical EM to Extract Planes from 3D Range Scans

©2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Presented at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 18-22 April 2005, Barcelona, Spain.DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2005.1570803Recently, the acquisition of three-dimensional maps has become more and more popular. This is motivated by the fact that robots act in the three-dimensional world and several tasks such as path planning or localizing objects can be carried out more reliable using three-dimensional representations. In this paper we consider the problem of extracting planes from three-dimensional range data. In contrast to previous approaches our algorithm uses a hierarchical variant of the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm [1] to simultaneously learn the main directions of the planar structures. These main directions are then used to correct the position and orientation of planes. In practical experiments carried out with real data and in simulations we demonstrate that our algorithm can accurately extract planes and their orientation from range data