Image-consistent patches from unstructured points with J-linkage

Going from unstructured cloud of points to surfaces is a challenging problem. However, as points are produced by a structure-and-motion pipeline, image-consistency is a powerful clue that comes to the rescue. In this paper we present a method for extracting planar patches from an unstructured cloud of points, based on the detection of image-consistent planar patches with J-linkage, a robust algorithm for multiple model fitting. The method integrates several constraints inside J-linkage, optimizes the position of the points with regard to image-consistency and deploys a hierarchical processing scheme that decreases the computational load. With respect to previous work this approach has the advantage of starting from sparse data. Several results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.