scholarly journals Classification of Airborne Laser Scanning Point Cloud Using Point-Based Convolutional Neural Network

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 444
Author(s):  
Jianfeng Zhu ◽  
Lichun Sui ◽  
Yufu Zang ◽  
He Zheng ◽  
Wei Jiang ◽  
...  

In various applications of airborne laser scanning (ALS), the classification of the point cloud is a basic and key step. It requires assigning category labels to each point, such as ground, building or vegetation. Convolutional neural networks have achieved great success in image classification and semantic segmentation, but they cannot be directly applied to point cloud classification because of the disordered and unstructured characteristics of point clouds. In this paper, we design a novel convolution operator to extract local features directly from unstructured points. Based on this convolution operator, we define the convolution layer, construct a convolution neural network to learn multi-level features from the point cloud, and obtain the category label of each point in an end-to-end manner. The proposed method is evaluated on two ALS datasets: the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Vaihingen 3D Labeling benchmark and the 2019 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Data Fusion Contest (DFC) 3D dataset. The results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for ALS point cloud classification, especially for the larger dataset DFC: we get an overall accuracy of 97.74% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.9202, ranking in first place on the contest website.

Author(s):  
M. Pilarska

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is a well-known and willingly used technology. One of the advantages of this technology is primarily its fast and accurate data registration. In recent years ALS is continuously developed. One of the latest achievements is multispectral ALS, which consists in obtaining simultaneously the data in more than one laser wavelength. In this article the results of the dual-wavelength ALS data classification are presented. The data were acquired with RIEGL VQ-1560i sensor, which is equipped with two laser scanners operating in different wavelengths: 532 nm and 1064 nm. Two classification approaches are presented in the article: classification, which is based on geometric relationships between points and classification, which mostly relies on the radiometric properties of registered objects. The overall accuracy of the geometric classification was 86 %, whereas for the radiometric classification it was 81 %. As a result, it can be assumed that the radiometric features which are provided by the multispectral ALS have potential to be successfully used in ALS point cloud classification.


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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (24) ◽  
pp. 9151-9169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cici Alexander ◽  
Kevin Tansey ◽  
Jörg Kaduk ◽  
David Holland ◽  
Nicholas J. Tate

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 6969
Author(s):  
Xiangda Lei ◽  
Hongtao Wang ◽  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Zongze Zhao ◽  
Jianqi Miao ◽  
...  

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud has been widely used in various fields, for it can acquire three-dimensional data with a high accuracy on a large scale. However, due to the fact that ALS data are discretely, irregularly distributed and contain noise, it is still a challenge to accurately identify various typical surface objects from 3D point cloud. In recent years, many researchers proved better results in classifying 3D point cloud by using different deep learning methods. However, most of these methods require a large number of training samples and cannot be widely used in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose an ALS point cloud classification method to integrate an improved fully convolutional network into transfer learning with multi-scale and multi-view deep features. First, the shallow features of the airborne laser scanning point cloud such as height, intensity and change of curvature are extracted to generate feature maps by multi-scale voxel and multi-view projection. Second, these feature maps are fed into the pre-trained DenseNet201 model to derive deep features, which are used as input for a fully convolutional neural network with convolutional and pooling layers. By using this network, the local and global features are integrated to classify the ALS point cloud. Finally, a graph-cuts algorithm considering context information is used to refine the classification results. We tested our method on the semantic 3D labeling dataset of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). Experimental results show that overall accuracy and the average F1 score obtained by the proposed method is 89.84% and 83.62%, respectively, when only 16,000 points of the original data are used for training.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1917
Author(s):  
Alma Elizabeth Thuestad ◽  
Ole Risbøl ◽  
Jan Ingolf Kleppe ◽  
Stine Barlindhaug ◽  
Elin Rose Myrvoll

What can remote sensing contribute to archaeological surveying in subarctic and arctic landscapes? The pros and cons of remote sensing data vary as do areas of utilization and methodological approaches. We assessed the applicability of remote sensing for archaeological surveying of northern landscapes using airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) and satellite and aerial images to map archaeological features as a basis for (a) assessing the pros and cons of the different approaches and (b) assessing the potential detection rate of remote sensing. Interpretation of images and a LiDAR-based bare-earth digital terrain model (DTM) was based on visual analyses aided by processing and visualizing techniques. 368 features were identified in the aerial images, 437 in the satellite images and 1186 in the DTM. LiDAR yielded the better result, especially for hunting pits. Image data proved suitable for dwellings and settlement sites. Feature characteristics proved a key factor for detectability, both in LiDAR and image data. This study has shown that LiDAR and remote sensing image data are highly applicable for archaeological surveying in northern landscapes. It showed that a multi-sensor approach contributes to high detection rates. Our results have improved the inventory of archaeological sites in a non-destructive and minimally invasive manner.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 261
Author(s):  
Francisco Mauro ◽  
Andrew T. Hudak ◽  
Patrick A. Fekety ◽  
Bryce Frank ◽  
Hailemariam Temesgen ◽  
...  

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) acquisitions provide piecemeal coverage across the western US, as collections are organized by local managers of individual project areas. In this study, we analyze different factors that can contribute to developing a regional strategy to use information from completed ALS data acquisitions and develop maps of multiple forest attributes in new ALS project areas in a rapid manner. This study is located in Oregon, USA, and analyzes six forest structural attributes for differences between: (1) synthetic (i.e., not-calibrated), and calibrated predictions, (2) parametric linear and semiparametric models, and (3) models developed with predictors computed for point clouds enclosed in the areas where field measurements were taken, i.e., “point-cloud predictors”, and models developed using predictors extracted from pre-rasterized layers, i.e., “rasterized predictors”. Forest structural attributes under consideration are aboveground biomass, downed woody biomass, canopy bulk density, canopy height, canopy base height, and canopy fuel load. Results from our study indicate that semiparametric models perform better than parametric models if no calibration is performed. However, the effect of the calibration is substantial in reducing the bias of parametric models but minimal for the semiparametric models and, once calibrations are performed, differences between parametric and semiparametric models become negligible for all responses. In addition, minimal differences between models using point-cloud predictors and models using rasterized predictors were found. We conclude that the approach that applies semiparametric models and rasterized predictors, which represents the easiest workflow and leads to the most rapid results, is justified with little loss in accuracy or precision even if no calibration is performed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-133
Author(s):  
Zdzisław Kurczyński

Abstract The article is a retrospective analysis of the development of airborne laser scanning technology in the country in the past twenty years, i.e. from the beginnings of this technique use in Poland to the present day. The emphasis in the text is placed on development trends and scientific and application problems in the field of technology undertaken by national research centres. The review is based on numerous publications in this field, which have been released over two decades mainly in the “Archive of Photogrammetry, Cartography and Remote Sensing”. Therefore, the article is a presentation of the progress in the area of airborne laser scanning through an attempt to systematize and review national publications in this scope. It also presents the development of the national production potential and the level of the country’s coverage with data and products derived from airborne laser scanning.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 3347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhishuang Yang ◽  
Bo Tan ◽  
Huikun Pei ◽  
Wanshou Jiang

The classification of point clouds is a basic task in airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud processing. It is quite a challenge when facing complex observed scenes and irregular point distributions. In order to reduce the computational burden of the point-based classification method and improve the classification accuracy, we present a segmentation and multi-scale convolutional neural network-based classification method. Firstly, a three-step region-growing segmentation method was proposed to reduce both under-segmentation and over-segmentation. Then, a feature image generation method was used to transform the 3D neighborhood features of a point into a 2D image. Finally, feature images were treated as the input of a multi-scale convolutional neural network for training and testing tasks. In order to obtain performance comparisons with existing approaches, we evaluated our framework using the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Working Groups II/4 (ISPRS WG II/4) 3D labeling benchmark tests. The experiment result, which achieved 84.9% overall accuracy and 69.2% of average F1 scores, has a satisfactory performance over all participating approaches analyzed.


Author(s):  
W. Ostrowski ◽  
M. Pilarska ◽  
J. Charyton ◽  
K. Bakuła

Creating 3D building models in large scale is becoming more popular and finds many applications. Nowadays, a wide term “3D building models” can be applied to several types of products: well-known CityGML solid models (available on few Levels of Detail), which are mainly generated from Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data, as well as 3D mesh models that can be created from both nadir and oblique aerial images. City authorities and national mapping agencies are interested in obtaining the 3D building models. Apart from the completeness of the models, the accuracy aspect is also important. Final accuracy of a building model depends on various factors (accuracy of the source data, complexity of the roof shapes, etc.). In this paper the methodology of inspection of dataset containing 3D models is presented. The proposed approach check all building in dataset with comparison to ALS point clouds testing both: accuracy and level of details. Using analysis of statistical parameters for normal heights for reference point cloud and tested planes and segmentation of point cloud provides the tool that can indicate which building and which roof plane in do not fulfill requirement of model accuracy and detail correctness. Proposed method was tested on two datasets: solid and mesh model.


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