Back to geometry: Efficient indoor space segmentation from point clouds by 2D–3D geometry constrains

Abstract

This paper addresses the challenge of indoor space segmentation from 3D point clouds, which is essential for understanding interior layouts, reconstructing 3D structures, and developing indoor navigation maps. While current deep learning-based methods rely on projecting 3D point clouds into 2D for instance extraction, they often fail to capture the local and global 3D features necessary for effectively segmenting complex indoor spaces, such as multi-ring nested structures. These methods also struggle with generalization across different scenes. In response, this paper proposes an efficient indoor space segmentation method that integrates both 2D and 3D geometric constraints. By leveraging the distribution characteristics of point clouds in 2D and the local and global features in 3D, the method achieves reliable extraction of vertical structural information in complex indoor environments. To address under-segmentation in small spaces due to varying scales, the paper introduces an adaptive extraction method for space partition anchors, guided by local features. During instance-level space segmentation, a hierarchical contour tree structure is employed to precisely partition complex indoor spaces, effectively handling circular and composite structures. The proposed approach was tested on 96 RGB-D scans from the Beike dataset and 6 large-scale indoor scenes from the S3DIS dataset, covering a range of complexities, sizes, and structures. The experimental section includes ablation studies and thorough comparisons with existing state-of-the-art spatial partitioning algorithms based on morphology and deep learning. Results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and generalization ability, providing a solid foundation for indoor space modeling and robotic navigation. The source code and datasets will be made publicly available via the “EISPGeo” link.