Strategies to evaluate the visibility along an indoor path in a point cloud representation

Abstract

Many research works have been oriented to the formulation of different algorithms for estimating the paths in indoor environments from three-dimensional representations of space. The architectural configuration, the actions that take place within it, and the location of some objects in the space influence the paths along which is it possible to move, as they may cause visibility problems. To overcome the visibility issue, different methods have been proposed which allow to identify the visible areas and from a certain point of view, but often they do not take into account the user's visual perception of the environment and not allow estimating how much may be complicated to follow a certain path. In the field of space syntax and cognitive science, it has been attempted to describe the characteristics of a building or an urban environment by the isovists and visibility graphs methods; some numerical properties of these representations allow to describe the space as for how it is perceived by a user. However, most of these studies are directed to analyze the environment in a two-dimensional space. In this paper we propose a method to evaluate in a quantitative way the complexity of a certain path within an environment represented by a three-dimensional point cloud, by the combination of some of the previously mentioned techniques, considering the space visible from a certain point of view, depending on the moving agent (pedestrian, people in wheelchairs, UAV, UGV, robot).