An Efficient Volumetric Mesh Representation for Real-Time Scene Reconstruction Using Spatial Hashing

• Published in: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) pp. 6323 - 6330
• Main Authors: Dong, Wei, Shi, Jieqi, Tang, Weijie, Wang, Xin, Zha, Hongbin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2018
• Subjects: Data integration; Data structures; Mesh generation; Real-time systems; Rendering (computer graphics); Sensors; Three-dimensional displays
• ISSN: 2577-087X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2018.8463157

Mesh plays an indispensable role in dense realtime reconstruction essential in robotics. Efforts have been made to maintain flexible data structures for 3D data fusion, yet an efficient incremental framework specifically designed for online mesh storage and manipulation is missing. We propose a novel framework to compactly generate, update, and refine mesh for scene reconstruction upon a volumetric representation. Maintaining a spatial-hashed field of cubes, we distribute vertices with continuous value on discrete edges that support O(1) vertex accessing and forbid memory redundancy. By introducing Hamming distance in mesh refinement, we further improve the mesh quality regarding the triangle type consistency with a low cost. Lock-based and lock-free operations were applied to avoid thread conflicts in GPU parallel computation. Experiments demonstrate that the mesh memory consumption is significantly reduced while the running speed is kept in the online reconstruction process.