Simultaneous multi-line-segment merging for robot mapping using Mean shift clustering

Line segment based representation of 2D robot maps is known to have advantages over raw point data or grid based representation gained from laser range scans. It significantly reduces the size of the data set. It also contains higher geometric information, which is necessary for robust post processing. The paper describes an algorithm to convert global 2D robot maps to line segment representation, using a pre-aligned set of point-based single scans as input. Mean-shift clustering on the set of all line segments is utilized to merge perceptually similar segments to single instances: locally linear features in the environment are unambiguously represented by single line segments in the final global map. Apart from a scaling parameter, the approach is parameter free. Experiments on real world data sets prove its applicability in the field of robot mapping.