Incremental Semantics-Aided Meshing from LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and RGB Direct Label Transfer
Organizations: Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, 7522 NB Enschede, Netherlands
Abstract
Geometric high-fidelity mesh reconstruction from LiDAR-inertial scans remains challenging in large, complex indoor environments -- such as cultural buildings -- where point cloud sparsity, geometric drift, and fixed fusion parameters produce holes, over-smoothing, and spurious surfaces at structural boundaries. We propose a modular, incremental RGB+LiDAR pipeline that generates incremental semantics-aided high-quality meshes from indoor scans through scan frame-based direct label transfer. A vision foundation model labels each incoming RGB frame; labels are incrementally projected and fused onto a LiDAR-inertial odometry map; and an incremental semantics-aware Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) fusion step produces the final mesh via marching cubes. This frame-level fusion strategy preserves the geometric fidelity of LiDAR while leveraging rich visual semantics to resolve geometric ambiguities at reconstruction boundaries caused by LiDAR point-cloud sparsity and geometric drift. We demonstrate that semantic guidance improves geometric reconstruction quality; quantitative evaluation is therefore performed using geometric metrics on the Oxford Spires dataset, while results from the NTU VIRAL dataset are analyzed qualitatively. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art geometric baselines ImMesh and Voxblox, demonstrating the benefit of semantics-aided fusion for geometric mesh quality. The resulting semantically labelled meshes are of value when reconstructing Universal Scene Description (USD) assets, offering a path from indoor LiDAR scanning to XR and digital modeling.
Figures & tables
| Method | Acc. (cm) | Comp. (%) | F1 (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| ImMesh | 17.40 | 95.99% | 96.31% |
| Voxblox | 17.24 | 97.17% | 96.98% |
| Ours | 14.54 | 98.55% | 98.58% |
| Dataset | Cert. (Labelled) | Sem. Unc. | Geo. Unc. | Both |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NTU-VIRAL | 4515082 (83%) | 776669 (14%) | 122051 (2%) | 33979 (1%) |
| Oxford Spires | 1348594 (81%) | 285470 (17%) | 23388 (1%) | 9364 (1%) |
3D Reconstruction
3D reconstruction recovers a scene’s shape, appearance, and camera motion from images, video, depth, or other sensor measurements.
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