Detecting Holes in Point Set Surfaces

Models of non-trivial objects resulting from a 3d data acquisition process (e.g. Laser Range Scanning) often contain holes due to occlusion, reflectance or transparency. As point set surfaces are unstructured surface representations with no adjacency or connectivity information, defining and detecting holes is a non-trivial task. In this paper we investigate properties of point sets to derive criteria for automatic hole detection. For each point, we combine several criteria into an integrated boundary probability. A final boundary loop extraction step uses this probability and exploits additional coherence properties of the boundary to derive a robust and automatic hole detection algorithm.