Edge Artifacts and Stray Points Filters in SCENE

The edge artifact filter eliminates edge noise from scans. Edge noise is due to the thickness of the laser line. The laser might catch a point on the edge of a table and on the floor which causes the point to be returned in the middle, as shown below.

This filter is very useful on curved objects, such as piping. It’s highly recommended to always use this filter.

This filter removes outliers or stray point. It checks if the 2D grid cell of a scan point contains a sufficient percentage of points with a distance similar to the scan point itself.

Parameters of this filter can be adjusted as follows:

• Grid Size: The size of the surrounding area used for comparison
• Distance Threshold: A scan point is counted if the difference in distance is smaller than the value of Distance Threshold. The algorithm is using the distances between the scanner and the points.
• Allocation Threshold: If at least the percentage of scan points indicated by the Allocation Threshold is below the Distance Threshold
  • To make the filter more aggressive:
    • Increase the Grid size
    • Decrease the distance threshold
    • Increase the allocation threshold

In General, it’s recommended to run this filter for most scenarios. The default settings offer a good compromise, be careful when changing these values to make the filter more aggressive. It could become too aggressive.

Take special care:

• When you want to preserve points over the tinny isolated objects like wires and cables
• When you have scans with low-resolution objects that are far from the scanner
• When the ground is mainly grass and you want to preserve it
• In surfaces where the angle between the surface and the laser beam is small