Plane Fitting in 3D Reconstruction to Preserve Smooth Homogeneous Surfaces

Photogrammetric techniques for weakly-textured surfaces without sufficient information about the R (red), G (green) and B (blue) primary colors of light are challenging. Considering that most urban or indoor object surfaces follow simple geometric shapes, a novel method for reconstructing smooth homogeneous planar surfaces based on MVS (Multi-View Stereo) is proposed. The idea behind it is to extract enough features for the image description, and to refine the dense points generated by the depth values of pixels with plane fitting, to favor the alignment of the surface to the detected planes. The SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) and AKAZE (Accelerated-KAZE) feature extraction algorithms are combined to ensure robustness and help retrieve connections in small samples. The smoothness of the enclosed watertight Poisson surface can be enhanced by enforcing the 3D points to be projected onto the absolute planes detected by a RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus)-based approach. Experimental evaluations of both cloud-to-mesh comparisons in the per-vertex distances with the ground truth models and visual comparisons with a popular mesh filtering based post-processing method indicate that the proposed method can considerably retain the integrity and smoothness of the reconstruction results. Combined with other primitive fittings, the reconstruction extent of homogeneous surfaces can be further extended, serving as primitive models for 3D building reconstruction, and providing guidance for future works in photogrammetry and 3D surface reconstruction.