MPI-I-2012-4-001

In this report we present a novel method for detecting partial symmetries in very large point clouds of 3D city scans. Unlike previous work, which was limited to data sets of a few hundred megabytes maximum, our method scales to very large scenes. We map the detection problem to a nearestneighbor search in a low-dimensional feature space, followed by a cascade of tests for geometric clustering of potential matches. Our algorithm robustly handles noisy real-world scanner data, obtaining a recognition performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. In practice, it scales linearly with the scene size and achieves a high absolute throughput, processing half a terabyte of raw scanner data over night on a dual socket commodity PC.