A compression method based on compressive sampling for 3-D laser range scans of indoor environments

When 3-D models of environments need to be transmitted or stored, they should be compressed efficiently to increase the capacity of the communication channel or the storage medium. We propose a novel compression technique based on compressive sensing, applied to sparse representations of 3-D range measurements. We develop a novel algorithm to generate sparse innovations between consecutive range measurements along the axis of the sensor's motion, since the range measurements do not have highly sparse representations in common domains. Compared with the performances of widely used compression techniques, the proposed method offers the smallest compression ratio and provides a reasonable balance between reconstruction error and processing time. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.