scholarly journals Manual Point Cloud Classification and Extraction for Hunter-Gatherer Feature Investigation: A Test Case From Two Low Arctic Paleo-Inuit Sites

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Landry ◽  
S. Brooke Milne ◽  
Robert W. Park ◽  
Ian J. Ferguson ◽  
Mostafa Fayek

AbstractFor archaeologists, the task of processing large terrestrial laser scanning (TLS)-derived point cloud data can be difficult, particularly when focusing on acquiring analytical and interpretive outcomes from the data. Using our TLS lidar data collected in 2013 from two compositionally different, low Arctic multi-component hunter-gatherer sites (LdFa-1 and LeDx-42), we demonstrate how a manual point cloud classification approach with open source software can be used to extract natural and archaeological features from a site’s surface. Through a combination of spectral datasets typical to TLS (i.e., intensity and RGB values), archaeologists can enhance the visual and analytical representation of archaeological huntergatherer site surfaces. Our approach classifies low visibility Arctic site point clouds into independent segments, each representing a different surface material found on the site. With the segmented dataset, we extract only the surface boulders to create an alternate characterization of the site’s prominent features and their surroundings. Using surface point clouds from Paleo-Inuit sites allows us to demonstrate the value of this approach within hunter-gatherer research as our results illustrate an effective use of large TLS datasets for extracting and improving our analytical capabilities for low relief site features.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 1192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen-Chieh Feng ◽  
Zhou Guo

The automating classification of point clouds capturing urban scenes is critical for supporting applications that demand three-dimensional (3D) models. Achieving this goal, however, is met with challenges because of the varying densities of the point clouds and the complexity of the 3D data. In order to increase the level of automation in the point cloud classification, this study proposes a segment-based parameter learning method that incorporates a two-dimensional (2D) land cover map, in which a strategy of fusing the 2D land cover map and the 3D points is first adopted to create labelled samples, and a formalized procedure is then implemented to automatically learn the following parameters of point cloud classification: the optimal scale of the neighborhood for segmentation, optimal feature set, and the training classifier. It comprises four main steps, namely: (1) point cloud segmentation; (2) sample selection; (3) optimal feature set selection; and (4) point cloud classification. Three datasets containing the point cloud data were used in this study to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The first two datasets cover two areas of the National University of Singapore (NUS) campus while the third dataset is a widely used benchmark point cloud dataset of Oakland, Pennsylvania. The classification parameters were learned from the first dataset consisting of a terrestrial laser-scanning data and a 2D land cover map, and were subsequently used to classify both of the NUS datasets. The evaluation of the classification results showed overall accuracies of 94.07% and 91.13%, respectively, indicating that the transition of the knowledge learned from one dataset to another was satisfactory. The classification of the Oakland dataset achieved an overall accuracy of 97.08%, which further verified the transferability of the proposed approach. An experiment of the point-based classification was also conducted on the first dataset and the result was compared to that of the segment-based classification. The evaluation revealed that the overall accuracy of the segment-based classification is indeed higher than that of the point-based classification, demonstrating the advantage of the segment-based approaches.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2846 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tong ◽  
Li ◽  
Zhang ◽  
Chen ◽  
Zhang ◽  
...  

Accurate and effective classification of lidar point clouds with discriminative features expression is a challenging task for scene understanding. In order to improve the accuracy and the robustness of point cloud classification based on single point features, we propose a novel point set multi-level aggregation features extraction and fusion method based on multi-scale max pooling and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). To this end, in the hierarchical point set feature extraction, point sets of different levels and sizes are first adaptively generated through multi-level clustering. Then, more effective sparse representation is implemented by locality-constrained linear coding (LLC) based on single point features, which contributes to the extraction of discriminative individual point set features. Next, the local point set features are extracted by combining the max pooling method and the multi-scale pyramid structure constructed by the point’s coordinates within each point set. The global and the local features of the point sets are effectively expressed by the fusion of multi-scale max pooling features and global features constructed by the point set LLC-LDA model. The point clouds are classified by using the point set multi-level aggregation features. Our experiments on two scenes of airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds—a mobile laser scanning (MLS) scene point cloud and a terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) scene point cloud—demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed point set multi-level aggregation features for point cloud classification, and the proposed method outperforms other related and compared algorithms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 859
Author(s):  
Elyta Widyaningrum ◽  
Qian Bai ◽  
Marda K. Fajari ◽  
Roderik C. Lindenbergh

Classification of aerial point clouds with high accuracy is significant for many geographical applications, but not trivial as the data are massive and unstructured. In recent years, deep learning for 3D point cloud classification has been actively developed and applied, but notably for indoor scenes. In this study, we implement the point-wise deep learning method Dynamic Graph Convolutional Neural Network (DGCNN) and extend its classification application from indoor scenes to airborne point clouds. This study proposes an approach to provide cheap training samples for point-wise deep learning using an existing 2D base map. Furthermore, essential features and spatial contexts to effectively classify airborne point clouds colored by an orthophoto are also investigated, in particularly to deal with class imbalance and relief displacement in urban areas. Two airborne point cloud datasets of different areas are used: Area-1 (city of Surabaya—Indonesia) and Area-2 (cities of Utrecht and Delft—the Netherlands). Area-1 is used to investigate different input feature combinations and loss functions. The point-wise classification for four classes achieves a remarkable result with 91.8% overall accuracy when using the full combination of spectral color and LiDAR features. For Area-2, different block size settings (30, 50, and 70 m) are investigated. It is found that using an appropriate block size of, in this case, 50 m helps to improve the classification until 93% overall accuracy but does not necessarily ensure better classification results for each class. Based on the experiments on both areas, we conclude that using DGCNN with proper settings is able to provide results close to production.


Author(s):  
W. Ao ◽  
L. Wang ◽  
J. Shan

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Point cloud classification is quite a challenging task due to the existence of noises, occlusion and various object types and sizes. Currently, the commonly used statistics-based features cannot accurately characterize the geometric information of a point cloud. This limitation often leads to feature confusion and classification mistakes (e.g., points of building corners and vegetation always share similar statistical features in a local neighbourhood, such as curvature, sphericity, etc). This study aims at solving this problem by leveraging the advantage of both the supervoxel segmentation and multi-scale features. For each point, its multi-scale features within different radii are extracted. Simultaneously, the point cloud is partitioned into simple supervoxel segments. After that, the class probability of each point is predicted by the proposed SegMSF approach that combines multi-scale features with the supervoxel segmentation results. At the end, the effect of data noises is supressed by using a global optimization that encourages spatial consistency of class labels. The proposed method is tested on both airborne laser scanning (ALS) and mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in terms of classifying objects of different scales and is robust to noise.</p>


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 4206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan Li ◽  
Xiaojun Cheng

Point cloud classification is an essential requirement for effectively utilizing point cloud data acquired by Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Neighborhood selection, feature selection and extraction, and classification of points based on the respective features constitute the commonly used workflow of point cloud classification. Feature selection and extraction has been the focus of many studies, and the choice of different features has had a great impact on classification results. In previous studies, geometric features were widely used for TLS point cloud classification, and only a few studies investigated the potential of both intensity and color on classification using TLS point cloud. In this paper, the geometric features, color features, and intensity features were extracted based on a supervoxel neighborhood. In addition, the original intensity was also corrected for range effect, which is why the corrected intensity features were also extracted. The different combinations of these features were tested on four real-world data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that both color and intensity features can complement the geometric features to help improve the classification results. Furthermore, the combination of geometric features, color features, and corrected intensity features together achieves the highest accuracy in our test.


Author(s):  
E. Hasanpour ◽  
M. Saadatseresht ◽  
E. G. Parmehr

Abstract. Point cloud classification is an essential requirement for effectively utilizing point cloud data acquired by different kind of sources such as Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), Aerial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), and Photogrammetry. Classification of point cloud is a process that points are separated into different point groups that each group has similar features. Point cloud classification can be done in three levels (point-based, segment-based, and object-based) and the choice of different level has significant impact on classification result. In this research, random forest classification method is utilized in which the point-wise and segment-wise spectral and geometric features are selected as the input of the classification. In our experiments, the results of point- and segment-based classification were compared. In addition, point-wise classification result for two different features (geometric with/without spectral features) has been compared and the results are presented. The experiments illustrated that segment based classification with both color and geometric features has the best overall accuracy of 83% especially near the object boundaries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2195
Author(s):  
Shiming Li ◽  
Xuming Ge ◽  
Shengfu Li ◽  
Bo Xu ◽  
Zhendong Wang

Today, mobile laser scanning and oblique photogrammetry are two standard urban remote sensing acquisition methods, and the cross-source point-cloud data obtained using these methods have significant differences and complementarity. Accurate co-registration can make up for the limitations of a single data source, but many existing registration methods face critical challenges. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a systematic incremental registration method that can successfully register MLS and photogrammetric point clouds in the presence of a large number of missing data, large variations in point density, and scale differences. The robustness of this method is due to its elimination of noise in the extracted linear features and its 2D incremental registration strategy. There are three main contributions of our work: (1) the development of an end-to-end automatic cross-source point-cloud registration method; (2) a way to effectively extract the linear feature and restore the scale; and (3) an incremental registration strategy that simplifies the complex registration process. The experimental results show that this method can successfully achieve cross-source data registration, while other methods have difficulty obtaining satisfactory registration results efficiently. Moreover, this method can be extended to more point-cloud sources.


Author(s):  
Y. Hori ◽  
T. Ogawa

The implementation of laser scanning in the field of archaeology provides us with an entirely new dimension in research and surveying. It allows us to digitally recreate individual objects, or entire cities, using millions of three-dimensional points grouped together in what is referred to as "point clouds". In addition, the visualization of the point cloud data, which can be used in the final report by archaeologists and architects, should usually be produced as a JPG or TIFF file. Not only the visualization of point cloud data, but also re-examination of older data and new survey of the construction of Roman building applying remote-sensing technology for precise and detailed measurements afford new information that may lead to revising drawings of ancient buildings which had been adduced as evidence without any consideration of a degree of accuracy, and finally can provide new research of ancient buildings. We used laser scanners at fields because of its speed, comprehensive coverage, accuracy and flexibility of data manipulation. Therefore, we “skipped” many of post-processing and focused on the images created from the meta-data simply aligned using a tool which extended automatic feature-matching algorithm and a popular renderer that can provide graphic results.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2181
Author(s):  
Hangbin Wu ◽  
Huimin Yang ◽  
Shengyu Huang ◽  
Doudou Zeng ◽  
Chun Liu ◽  
...  

The existing deep learning methods for point cloud classification are trained using abundant labeled samples and used to test only a few samples. However, classification tasks are diverse, and not all tasks have enough labeled samples for training. In this paper, a novel point cloud classification method for indoor components using few labeled samples is proposed to solve the problem of the requirement for abundant labeled samples for training with deep learning classification methods. This method is composed of four parts: mixing samples, feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and semantic classification. First, the few labeled point clouds are mixed with unlabeled point clouds. Next, the mixed high-dimensional features are extracted using a deep learning framework. Subsequently, a nonlinear manifold learning method is used to embed the mixed features into a low-dimensional space. Finally, the few labeled point clouds in each cluster are identified, and semantic labels are provided for unlabeled point clouds in the same cluster by a neighborhood search strategy. The validity and versatility of the proposed method were validated by different experiments and compared with three state-of-the-art deep learning methods. Our method uses fewer than 30 labeled point clouds to achieve an accuracy that is 1.89–19.67% greater than existing methods. More importantly, the experimental results suggest that this method is not only suitable for single-attribute indoor scenarios but also for comprehensive complex indoor scenarios.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (20) ◽  
pp. 4569
Author(s):  
Joan R. Rosell-Polo ◽  
Eduard Gregorio ◽  
Jordi Llorens

In this editorial, we provide an overview of the content of the special issue on “Terrestrial Laser Scanning”. The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together innovative developments and applications of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), understood in a broad sense. Thus, although most contributions mainly involve the use of laser-based systems, other alternative technologies that also allow for obtaining 3D point clouds for the measurement and the 3D characterization of terrestrial targets, such as photogrammetry, are also considered. The 15 published contributions are mainly focused on the applications of TLS to the following three topics: TLS performance and point cloud processing, applications to civil engineering, and applications to plant characterization.


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