  With the recent development of high-end LiDARs, more and more systems are
able to continuously map the environment while moving and producing spatially
redundant information. However, none of the previous approaches were able to
effectively exploit this redundancy in a dense LiDAR mapping problem. In this
paper, we present a new approach for dense LiDAR mapping using probabilistic
surfel fusion. The proposed system is capable of reconstructing a high-quality
dense surface element (surfel) map from spatially redundant multiple views.
This is achieved by a proposed probabilistic surfel fusion along with a
geometry considered data association. The proposed surfel data association
method considers surface resolution as well as high measurement uncertainty
along its beam direction which enables the mapping system to be able to control
surface resolution without introducing spatial digitization. The proposed
fusion method successfully suppresses the map noise level by considering
measurement noise caused by laser beam incident angle and depth distance in a
Bayesian filtering framework. Experimental results with simulated and real data
for the dense surfel mapping prove the ability of the proposed method to
accurately find the canonical form of the environment without further
post-processing.
