Improved hole repairing algorithm for livestock point clouds based on cubic B-spline for region defining

•Our Algorithm can effectively repair the pig’s 3D point cloud with large and non-close holes blocked by the railing.•Our repairing algorithm compared with the polar coordinate transformation, surface fitting, and triangulation algorithm is more accurate in the automatic calculation of abdominal circumference measurement.•Our repairing algorithm adopts the defined region to locate the hole area, which can reduce the calculating number of points and greatly improve the repairing efficiency.•Our repairing algorithm appropriately makes the point cloud sparse and makes their distribution more uniform.•The repaired high-quality pig point cloud plays an important role in pig point cloud segmentation, volume calculation, and weight estimation.