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This paper addresses the evaluation of algorithms reconstructing a watertight surface from a point cloud acquired on an open scene. The objective is to set a rigorous protocol measuring the quality of the reconstruction and to propose a quality metric that is informative with respect to the various qualities that such an algorithm should have, and in particular its capacity to interpolate and extrapolate accurately. Our approach aims at being more informative and rigorous than previous works on this topic. In addition, we use publicly available data and our implementation is open-source. We argue that a rigorous evaluation of surface reconstruction of open scenes needs to be performed on synthetic data where a perfect continuous ground truth surface is available, so we developed our own LiDAR simulator of which we give a description in the present paper.

This paper deals with the distributed computation of Delaunay triangulations of massive point sets, mainly motivated by the needs of a scalable out-of-core surface reconstruction workflow from massive urban LIDAR datasets. Such a data often corresponds to a huge point cloud represented through a set of tiles of relatively homogeneous point sizes. This will be the input of our algorithm which will naturally partition this data across multiple processing elements. The distributed computation and communication between processing elements is orchestrated efficiently through an uncentralized model to represent, manage and locally construct the triangulation corresponding to each tile. Initially inspired by the star splaying approach, we review the Tile& Merge algorithm for computing Distributed Delaunay Triangulations on the cloud, provide a theoretical proof of correctness of this algorithm, and analyse the performance of our Spark implementation in terms of speedup and strong scaling in both synthetic and real use case datasets. A HPC implementation (e.g. using MPI), left for future work, would benefit from its more efficient message passing paradigm but lose the robustness and failure resilience of our Spark approach.

We introduce a new method for the piecewise-planar approximation of 3D data, including point clouds and meshes. Our method is designed to operate on large datasets (e.g. millions of vertices) containing planar structures, which are very frequent in anthropic scenes. Our approach is also adaptive to the local geometric complexity of the input data. Our main contribution is the formulation of the piecewise-planar approximation problem as a non-convex optimization problem. In turn, this problem can be efficiently solved with a graph-structured working set approach. We compare our results with a state-of-the-art region-growing-based segmentation method and show a significant improvement both in terms of approximation error and computation efficiency.

Despite of the popularity of Delauney structure for mesh generation, octree based approaches remain an interesting solution for a first step surface reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a generic framework for a octree cell based mesh generation. Its input is a set of Lidar-based 3D measurements or other inputs which are formulated as a set of mass functions that characterize the level of confidence on the occupancy of each octree’s leaf. The output is a binary segmentation of the space between occupied and empty areas by taking into account the uncertainty of data. To this end, the problem is then reduced to a global energy optimization framework efficiently optimized with a min-cut approach. We use the approach for producing a large scale surface reconstruction algorithm by merging data from ubiquitous sources like airborne, terrestrial Lidar data, occupancy map and extra cues. Once the surface is computed, a solution is proposed for texturing the mesh.

Fog disturbs the proper image processing in many outdoor observation tools. For instance, fog reduces the visibility of obstacles in vehicle driving applications. Usually, the estimation of the amount of fog in the scene image allows to greatly improve the image processing, and thus to better perform the observation task. One possibility is to restore the visibility of the contrasts in the image from the foggy scene image before applying the usual image processing. Several algorithms were proposed in the recent years for defogging. Before to apply the defogging, it is necessary to detect the presence of fog, not to emphasis the contrasts due to noise. Surprisingly, few a reduced number of image processing algorithms were proposed for fog detection and characterization. Most are dedicated to static cameras and can not be used when the camera is moving. Daytime fog is characterized by its extinction coefficient, which is equivalent to the visibility distance. A visibility-meter can be used for fog detection and characterization, but this kind of sensor performs an estimation in a relatively small volume of air, and is thus sensitive to heterogeneous fog, and air turbulence with moving cameras. In this paper, we propose an original algorithm, based on entropy minimization, to detect fog and estimate its extinction coefficient by the processing of stereo pairs. This algorithm is fast, provides accurate results using low cost stereo camera sensor and, the more important, can work when the cameras are moving. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on synthetic and camera images with ground truth. Results show that the proposed method is accurate, and, combined with a fast stereo reconstruction algorithm, should provide a solution, close to real time, for fog detection and visibility estimation for moving sensors.

Medical records of 75 eyes from 75 consecutive patients with uncomplicated rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD) who underwent pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) were analyzed. Inclusion criteria were patients with RRD who underwent primary 23- or 25-gauge PPV with air, gas, or SiO tamponade and performed by a single surgeon, no use of perfluorocarbon liquids (PFCL) and drainage retinotomy, and follow-up ≥ six months. Exclusion criteria were patients who underwent previous vitreoretinal surgery, proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) more than grade B, giant tears, and encircling band associated with PPV. The main endpoint was the anatomical retinal reattachment rate after a single surgical procedure. Secondary endpoints were best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), postoperative retinal displacement, and intraoperative and/or postoperative complications. Primary anatomical success was achieved in 97.3% of cases using this modified surgical procedure. Retinal slippage occurred only in 28.2% of patients and it was not observed in all cases of macula-on RRD. The mean logMAR of the BCVA significantly improved in 92% of patients and no intraoperative complications were observed. The results suggest that complete subretinal liquid drainage is not mandatory for all RRD cases treated with PPV and that using PFCL and performing a drainage retinotomy are not essential in eyes with primary RRD and PVR less than grade B. Postoperative positioning after PPV for uncomplicated RRD based on the presence or absence of residual subretinal fluid at the end of surgery could limit the occurrence of postoperative retinal displacement, while promoting patient compliance., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Paolo Chelazzi et al.)

The bilateral filter and its variants, such as the joint/cross bilateral filter, are well-known edge-preserving image smoothing tools used in many applications. The reason of this success is its simple definition and the possibility of many adaptations. The bilateral filter is known to be related to robust estimation. This link is lost by the ad hoc introduction of the guide image in the joint/cross bilateral filter. We here propose a new way to derive the joint/cross bilateral filter as a particular case of a more generic filter, which we name the guided bilateral filter. This new filter is iterative, generic, inherits the robustness properties of the robust bilateral filter, and uses a guide image. The link with robust estimation allows us to relate the filter parameters with the statistics of input images. A scheme based on graduated nonconvexity is proposed, which allows converging to an interesting local minimum even when the cost function is nonconvex. With this scheme, the guided bilateral filter can handle non-Gaussian noise on the image to be filtered. A complementary scheme is also proposed to handle non-Gaussian noise on the guide image even if both are strongly correlated. This allows the guided bilateral filter to handle situations with more noise than the joint/cross bilateral filter can work with and leads to high peak signal-to-noise ratio values as shown experimentally.