Locally controlled globally smooth ground surface reconstruction from terrestrial point clouds

Abstract: Approaches to ground surface reconstruction from massive terrestrial point clouds are presented. Using a set of local least squares (LSQR) planes, the "holes" are filled either from the ground model of the next coarser level or by Hermite Radial Basis Functions (HRBF). Global curvature continuous as well as infinitely smooth ground surface models are obtained with Partition of Unity (PU) using either tensor product B-Splines or compactly supported exponential function. The resulting surface function has local control enabling fast evaluation.