Space-Time Co-Segmentation of Articulated Point Cloud Sequences

Abstract

Consistent segmentation is to the center of many applications based on dynamic geometric data. Directly segmenting a raw 3D point cloud sequence is a challenging task due to the low data quality and large inter-frame variation across the whole sequence. We propose a local-to-global approach to co-segment point cloud sequences of articulated objects into near-rigid moving parts. Our method starts from a per-frame point clustering, derived from a robust voting-based trajectory analysis. The local segments are then progressively propagated to the neighboring frames with a cut propagation operation, and further merged through all frames using a novel space-time segment grouping technqiue, leading to a globally consistent and compact segmentation of the entire articulated point cloud sequence. Such progressive propagating and merging, in both space and time dimensions, makes our co-segmentation algorithm especially robust in handling noise, occlusions and pose/view variations that are usually associated with raw scan data.