Local to Global Plane Regularity Aggregation for Dense Surfel Mapping

In this paper, we propose a novel local to global plane regularity aggregation framework for dense surfel mapping, aiming for real-time reconstruction of high-quality 3D global models in both indoor and urban environments. Different from prior works that directly localize surfels globally, we investigate three interplanar geometric relations: {coplanarity, parallelism, orthogonality} from local to global scales as additional structural regularities in reconstruction, promoting the performance in plane-dominated scenes remarkably. Given a monocular RGB-D video as input, our framework extracts and utilizes the interplanar relations in three stages: local surfel creation, local to global relation propagation, and global plane-guided re-localization. In the first stage, surfels are created and refined within the current frame by aggregating temporal and spatial cues. The interplanar relations are adopted to regulate the normal and position of each surfel. Then in the second stage, we simultaneously establish correspondences between the created surfels and global model and propagate the interplanar relations from local to global. Finally, the positions of surfels are further relocated and optimized in a larger scale, based on the global interplanar relation priors aggregated across all local frames. Extensive experiments on datasets of different scales demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in terms of consistency and accuracy of the reconstructed global model. Meanwhile, the capability of our framework in the real-time 3D reconstruction on CPU opens the door to practical application.