Two-dimensional environment reconstruction based on the absolute local deflection angle of laser scanning data

Successive edge following (SEF) is extensively used to extract environment characteristics from two-dimensional laser scanning data given its simplicity. Conventional SEF compares the Euclidean distance between two adjacent points to either a fixed or an adaptive threshold. However, the segmentation accuracy is low and information loss occurs during processing of planes with a large deflection angle with respect to the laser sensor because the distance estimation is sensitive to this angle. Moreover, available SEF algorithms cannot suitably determine corners in the environment. To address these problems, we propose an extended SEF algorithm based on the absolute local deflection angle of laser scanning points. The proposed algorithm determines the local deflection angle between target and reference points, and an adaptive threshold is calculated based on the range precision of the laser sensor. Furthermore, corners are efficiently estimated and noise is mitigated by using three constraints. An experiment on two-dimensional environment reconstruction of an underground parking lot verifies the accuracy and capability of the proposed algorithm to reconstruct the lines and corners representing the environment. (c) 2019 Optical Society of America.