A system in a vehicle includes a lidar system to transmit incident light and receive reflections from one or more objects as a point cloud of points. The system also includes processing circuitry to identify planar points and to identify edge points of the point cloud. Each set of planar points forms a linear pattern and each edge point is between two sets of planar points, and the processing circuitry identifies each point of the points of the point cloud as being within a virtual beam among a set of virtual beams. Each virtual beam of the set of virtual beams representing a horizontal band of the point cloud.