Triangular mesh establishment of 3D laser scanning data based on ellipsoidal projection

The establishment of high quality triangular mesh is one of the key steps in 3D laser scanning data processing. Traditional triangulation algorithms have been proposed directly on the basis of adjacency relation between points in 3D space. However, when the point density is non-uniform or the noise exists, the problems such as surface hole, dough sheet overlapping and inconsistent normal appear easily. In this paper, a triangular mesh establishing algorithm based on ellipsoidal projection is proposed. After comparing the theory of ellipsoidal projection and cylindrical projection, the proposed triangular mesh establishing algorithm is analyzed in detail including basic idea and implementation method. To evaluate the performance and efficiency of the proposed algorithm, two experiments are then carried out on the 3D point cloud data of a foundation pit. The results indicate that though the computational efficiency of proposed algorithm is a little inferior to the algorithm based on cylindrical projection, the proposed algorithm is more effective for establishing point cloud of both top and bottom of the object and the original topological relation of 3D scanning points can be maintained better.