Room segmentation in 3D point clouds using anisotropic potential fields

Emerging applications, such as indoor navigation or facility management, present new requirements of automatic and robust partitioning of indoor 3D point clouds into rooms. Previous research is either based on the Manhattan-world assumption or relies on the availability of the scanner pose information. We address these limitations by following the architectural definition of a room, where the room is an inner free space separated from other spaces through openings or partitions. For this we formulate an anisotropic potential field for 3D environments and illustrate how it can be used for room segmentation in the proposed segmentation pipeline. The experimental results confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a number of datasets including those that violate the Manhattan-world assumption.