Systems and methods for real-time large-scale point cloud surface reconstruction

Abstract

A system and method of real-time surface reconstruction upon unstructured point clouds via a series of screen space operations are provided herein. A point occlusion operator, performed in a deferred pass upon a simple point splat, is used to determine point visibility and an ambient occlusion factor to estimate a solid angle of a visibility cone produced by each point in the splat by splitting the screen space local neighborhood of the point into sectors and accumulating the maximum viable sector angle. Points are valid or invalid. A density estimation pass is then used. Maps are used to determine the required number of region growing iterations to cover every invalid pixel. The density is then pruned by edge creep reduction to minimize the error around edges. A median filter is used to fill invalid pixels, while edge-preserving blur is applied to the valid pixels.