VxH: A systematic determination of efficient hierarchical voxel structures

3D maps with many millions to billions of points are now used in an increasing number of applications, with processing rates in the hundreds of thousands to millions of points per second. In mobile applications, power and energy consumption for managing such data and extracting useful information thereof are critical concerns. We have developed structures and methodologies with the purpose of minimizing memory usage and associated energy consumption for indexing and serialization of voxelized point-clouds. The primary source of points in our case is airborne laser scanning, but our methodology is not restricted to only such setting. Our emulated results show a memory usage reduction factor of roughly up to 200 × that of Octree/Octomap, and a file size reduction factor of up to 1.65 × compared the predominating compression scheme for airborne Lidar data, LASzip. In addition, our structures enable significantly more efficient processing since they are included in a hierarchical structure that captures geometric aspects.