PlanarMesh: building compact 3D meshes from LiDAR using incremental adaptive resolution reconstruction

Conference item

Building an online 3D LiDAR mapping system that produces a detailed surface reconstruction while remaining computationally efficient is a challenging task. In this paper, we present PlanarMesh, a novel incremental, mesh-based LiDAR reconstruction system that adaptively adjusts mesh resolution to achieve compact, detailed reconstructions in real-time. It introduces a new representation, planar-mesh, which combines plane modeling and meshing to capture both large surfaces and detailed geometry. The planar-mesh can be incrementally updated considering both local surface curvature and freespace information from sensor measurements. We employ a multi-threaded architecture with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for efficient data storage and fast search operations, enabling real-time performance. Experimental results show that our method achieves reconstruction accuracy on par with, or exceeding, state-of-the-art techniques—including truncated signed distance functions, occupancy mapping, and voxel-based meshing—while producing smaller output file sizes (10 times smaller than raw input and more than 5 times smaller than mesh-based methods) and maintaining real-time performance (around 2 Hz for a 64-beam sensor).

Authors: Fallon, M

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IEEE
• Acceptance date: 2025-07-01
• Event title: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025)
• Event location: Hangzhao, China
• Event website: https://www.iros25.org/
• Event start date: 2025-10-19
• Event end date: 2025-10-25
• Language: English