Visualizing Sparsely Scanned Outdoor Environments

Capturing and animating real-world scenes have attracted increasing research interest. To offer unconstrained navigation of the scenes, 3D representations are first needed. Advancement in laser scanning technology is making 3D acquisition feasible for objects of ever larger scales. However, outdoor environment scans demonstrate the following properties: (1) incompleteness - a complete scan of every object in the environment is impossible to obtain due to self- and inter-object obstruction and constrained accessibility of the scanner; (2) complexity - natural objects, such as trees and plants are complex in terms of their geometric shapes; (3) inaccuracy - data can be unreliable due to scanning hardware limitations and movement of objects, such as plants and trees during the scanning process; and (4) large data size. These properties raise unprecedented challenges for existing methods. In this talk, I will describe our solutions towards addressing these challenges. They fall into two directions of approach: the first one is artistic abstraction and depiction of point clouds, and the second one is constructing full geometry out of limited scans.