Detecting moving spheres in 3D point clouds via the 3D velocity Hough Transform

We present a new approach to extracting moving spheres from a sequence of 3D point clouds. The new 3D velocity Hough Transform (3DVHT) incorporates motion parameters in addition to structural parameters in an evidence gathering process to accurately detect moving spheres at any given point cloud from the sequence. We demonstrate its capability to detect spheres which are obscured within the sequence of point clouds, which conventional approaches cannot achieve. We apply our algorithm on real and synthetic data and demonstrate the ability of detecting fully occluded spheres by exploiting inter-frame correlation within the 3D point cloud sequence.