Construction of regular 3D point clouds using octree partitioning and resampling

We propose a construction algorithm of regular 3D point clouds from irregular ones. An irregular point cloud is partitioned hierarchically using an octree, and the points in each octree node are projected onto a square face, called a base plane, of the cubic node. The geometry of the point cloud is then represented by the height fields on the base planes. The height fields are interpolated and then resampled uniformly on the base plane. Consequently, the original geometry is represented by the scalar height fields, each of which is defined at uniform grid points on a square region. Therefore, the resulting geometry can be easily processed by conventional 2D image processing techniques.