3D Reconstruction of Rough Terrain for USARSim Using a Height-map Method

Published

August 21, 2008

Author(s)

Gael Roberts, Stephen B. Balakirsky, Sebti Foufou

Abstract

In this paper, we present a process for a simplified reconstruction of rough terrains from point clouds acquired using laser scanners. The main idea of this work is to build height-maps which are level gray-scale images representing the ground elevation. These height-maps are generated from step-fields which can be represented by a set of side-by-side pillars. Although height-maps are a practical mean for rough terrain reconstruction, it is not possible to represent two different elevations for a given location with one height-map. This is an important drawback as terrain point clouds can show different zones representing surfaces above other surfaces. In this paper, we describe a methodology to create several heightmaps for the same terrain. We show some experimental results using the high-fidelity physics-based framework for the Unified System for Automation and Robot Simulation (USARSim).

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 2008 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS) Workshop

Conference Dates

August 19-21, 2008

Conference Location

Gaithersburg, MD

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

3D Reconstruction, height-map, step-field, point cloud, USARSim

Citation

Roberts, G. , Balakirsky, S. and Foufou, S. (2008), 3D Reconstruction of Rough Terrain for USARSim Using a Height-map Method, Proceedings of the 2008 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems (PerMIS) Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=824726 (Accessed October 23, 2025)