Wavelet frame based scene reconstruction from range data

How to reconstruct the scene (a visible surface) from a set of scattered, noisy and possibly sparse range data is a challenging problem in robotic navigation and computer graphics. As most real scenes can be modeled by piecewise smooth surfaces, traditional surface fitting techniques (e.g. smoothing spline) generally can not preserve sharp discontinuities of surfaces. Based on sparse approximation of piecewise smooth functions in frame domain, we propose a new tight frame based formulation for reconstructing a piecewise smooth surface from a sparse range data set, which is robust to both additive noise and outliers. Furthermore, the resulting minimization problem from our formulation can be efficiently solved by the split Bregman method [1,2]. The numerical experiments show that the proposed approach is capable of reconstructing a piecewise smooth surface with sharp edges from sparse range data corrupted with noise and outliers.