Local surface sampling step estimation for extracting boundaries of planar point clouds

This paper presents a new approach to estimate the surface sampling step of planar point clouds acquired by Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) which is varying with the distance to the surface and the angular positions. The local surface sampling step is obtained by doing a first order Taylor expansion of planar point coordinates. Then, it is shown how to use it in Delaunay-based boundary point extraction. The resulting approach, which is implemented in the ModiBuilding software, is applied to two facade point clouds of a building. The first is acquired with a single station and the second with two stations. In both cases, the proposed approach performs very accurately and appears to be robust to the variations of the point cloud density.