Planar Segmentation of RGBD Images Using Fast Linear Fitting and Markov Chain Monte Carlo

With the advent of affordable RGBD sensors such as the Kinect, the collection of depth and appearance information from a scene has become effortless. However, neither the correct noise model for these sensors, nor a principled methodology for extracting planar segmentations has been developed yet. In this work, we advance the state of art with the following contributions: we correctly model the Kinect sensor data by observing that the data has inherent noise only over the measured disparity values, we formulate plane fitting as a linear least-squares problem that allow us to quickly merge different segments, and we apply an advanced Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, generalized Swendsen-Wang sampling, to efficiently search the space of planar segmentations. We evaluate our plane fitting and surface reconstruction algorithms with simulated and real-world data.