scholarly journals Hierarchical Regularization of Building Boundaries in Noisy Aerial Laser Scanning and Photogrammetric Point Clouds

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linfu Xie ◽  
Qing Zhu ◽  
Han Hu ◽  
Bo Wu ◽  
Yuan Li ◽  
...  

Aerial laser scanning or photogrammetric point clouds are often noisy at building boundaries. In order to produce regularized polygons from such noisy point clouds, this study proposes a hierarchical regularization method for the boundary points. Beginning with detected planar structures from raw point clouds, two stages of regularization are employed. In the first stage, the boundary points of an individual plane are consolidated locally by shifting them along their refined normal vector to resist noise, and then grouped into piecewise smooth segments. In the second stage, global regularities among different segments from different planes are softly enforced through a labeling process, in which the same label represents parallel or orthogonal segments. This is formulated as a Markov random field and solved efficiently via graph cut. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for extracting 2D footprints and 3D polygons of buildings in metropolitan area. The results reveal that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively in compactness. The simplified polygons could fit the original boundary points with an average residuals of 0.2 m, and in the meantime reduce up to 90% complexities of the edges. The satisfactory performances of the proposed method show a promising potential for 3D reconstruction of polygonal models from noisy point clouds.

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youqiang Dong ◽  
Ximin Cui ◽  
Li Zhang ◽  
Haibin Ai

The progressive TIN (triangular irregular network) densification (PTD) filter algorithm is widely used for filtering point clouds. In the PTD algorithm, the iterative densification parameters become smaller over the entire process of filtering. This leads to the performance—especially the type I errors of the PTD algorithm—being poor for point clouds with high density and standard variance. Hence, an improved PTD filtering algorithm for point clouds with high density and variance is proposed in this paper. This improved PTD method divides the iterative densification process into two stages. In the first stage, the iterative densification process of the PTD algorithm is used, and the two densification parameters become smaller. When the density of points belonging to the TIN is higher than a certain value (in this paper, we define this density as the standard variance intervention density), the iterative densification process moves into the second stage. In the second stage, a new iterative densification strategy based on multi-scales is proposed, and the angle threshold becomes larger. The experimental results show that the improved PTD algorithm can effectively reduce the type I errors and total errors of the DIM point clouds by 7.53% and 4.09%, respectively, compared with the PTD algorithm. Although the type II errors increase slightly in our improved method, the wrongly added objective points have little effect on the accuracy of the generated DSM. In short, our improved PTD method perfects the classical PTD method and offers a better solution for filtering point clouds with high density and standard variance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 11596-11603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minghua Liu ◽  
Lu Sheng ◽  
Sheng Yang ◽  
Jing Shao ◽  
Shi-Min Hu

3D point cloud completion, the task of inferring the complete geometric shape from a partial point cloud, has been attracting attention in the community. For acquiring high-fidelity dense point clouds and avoiding uneven distribution, blurred details, or structural loss of existing methods' results, we propose a novel approach to complete the partial point cloud in two stages. Specifically, in the first stage, the approach predicts a complete but coarse-grained point cloud with a collection of parametric surface elements. Then, in the second stage, it merges the coarse-grained prediction with the input point cloud by a novel sampling algorithm. Our method utilizes a joint loss function to guide the distribution of the points. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing methods in both the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and the Chamfer Distance (CD).


Author(s):  
H. Takahashi ◽  
H. Date ◽  
S. Kanai ◽  
K. Yasutake

Abstract. Laser scanning technology is useful to create accurate three-dimensional models of indoor environments for applications such as maintenance, inspection, renovation, and simulations. In this paper, a detection method of indoor attached equipment such as windows, lightings, and fire alarms, from TLS point clouds, is proposed. In order to make the method robust against to the lack of points of equipment surface, a footprint of the equipment is used for detection, because the entire or a part of the footprint boundary shapes explicitly appear as the boundary of base surfaces, i.e. walls for windows, and ceilings for lightings and fire alarms. In the method, first, base surface regions are extracted from given TLS point clouds of indoor environments. Then, footprint boundary points are detected from the region boundary points. Finally, target equipment is detected by fitting or voting using given target footprint shapes. The features of our method are footprint boundary point extraction considering occlusions, shape fitting with adaptive parameters based on point intervals, and robust shape detection by voting from multiple footprint boundary candidates. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using TLS point clouds.


Drones ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan P. Resop ◽  
Laura Lehmann ◽  
W. Cully Hession

Lidar remote sensing has been used to survey stream channel and floodplain topography for decades. However, traditional platforms, such as aerial laser scanning (ALS) from an airplane, have limitations including flight altitude and scan angle that prevent the scanner from collecting a complete survey of the riverscape. Drone laser scanning (DLS) or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based lidar offer ways to scan riverscapes with many potential advantages over ALS. We compared point clouds and lidar data products generated with both DLS and ALS for a small gravel-bed stream, Stroubles Creek, located in Blacksburg, VA. Lidar data points were classified as ground and vegetation, and then rasterized to produce digital terrain models (DTMs) representing the topography and canopy height models (CHMs) representing the vegetation. The results highlighted that the lower-altitude, higher-resolution DLS data were more capable than ALS of providing details of the channel profile as well as detecting small vegetation on the floodplain. The greater detail gained with DLS will provide fluvial researchers with better estimates of the physical properties of riverscape topography and vegetation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 2318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingyuan Zhu ◽  
Jinjin Wu ◽  
Huosheng Hu ◽  
Chunsheng Xiao ◽  
Wei Chen

When 3D laser scanning (LIDAR) is used for navigation of autonomous vehicles operated on unstructured terrain, it is necessary to register the acquired point cloud and accurately perform point cloud reconstruction of the terrain in time. This paper proposes a novel registration method to deal with uneven-density and high-noise of unstructured terrain point clouds. It has two steps of operation, namely initial registration and accurate registration. Multisensor data is firstly used for initial registration. An improved Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is then deployed for accurate registration. This algorithm extracts key points and builds feature descriptors based on the neighborhood normal vector, point cloud density and curvature. An adaptive threshold is introduced to accelerate iterative convergence. Experimental results are given to show that our two-step registration method can effectively solve the uneven-density and high-noise problem in registration of unstructured terrain point clouds, thereby improving the accuracy of terrain point cloud reconstruction.


Author(s):  
R. Miyazaki ◽  
M. Yamamoto ◽  
E. Hanamoto ◽  
H. Izumi ◽  
K. Harada

Planar structure detection from point clouds is important process in many applications such as maintenance of infrastructure facility including roads and curbs because most artificial structures consists of planar surfaces. The Mobile Mapping System can obtain a large amount of points with traveling at a standard speed. However, in the case that the high-end laser scanning system is equipped, the distribution density of points is uneven. In the point-based method, this situation causes the problem to the method of calculating geometric information using neighborhood points. In this paper, we propose a line-based region growing method in order to detect planar structures with precise boundary from point clouds with uneven distribution density of points. The precise boundary of a planar structure is maintained by appropriately creating line segments from the input clouds. We adapt the definition of neighborhood and the estimation of the normal vector to the line-based region growing. The evaluation by comparing our result with manually extracted points shows that more than 98% of curb points are detected. And, about 90% of the boundary points between a road and a curb are detected with less than 0.005 meters of the distance error.


Author(s):  
M. R. Hess ◽  
V. Petrovic ◽  
F. Kuester

Digital documentation of cultural heritage structures is increasingly more common through the application of different imaging techniques. Many works have focused on the application of laser scanning and photogrammetry techniques for the acquisition of threedimensional (3D) geometry detailing cultural heritage sites and structures. With an abundance of these 3D data assets, there must be a digital environment where these data can be visualized and analyzed. Presented here is a feedback driven visualization framework that seamlessly enables interactive exploration and manipulation of massive point cloud data. The focus of this work is on the classification of different building materials with the goal of building more accurate as-built information models of historical structures. User defined functions have been tested within the interactive point cloud visualization framework to evaluate automated and semi-automated classification of 3D point data. These functions include decisions based on observed color, laser intensity, normal vector or local surface geometry. Multiple case studies are presented here to demonstrate the flexibility and utility of the presented point cloud visualization framework to achieve classification objectives.


Author(s):  
A. A. Sidiropoulos ◽  
K. N. Lakakis ◽  
V. K. Mouza

The technology of 3D laser scanning is considered as one of the most common methods for heritage documentation. The point clouds that are being produced provide information of high detail, both geometric and thematic. There are various studies that examine techniques of the best exploitation of this information. In this study, an algorithm of pathology localization, such as cracks and fissures, on complex building surfaces is being tested. The algorithm makes use of the points’ position in the point cloud and tries to distinguish them in two groups-patterns; pathology and non-pathology. The extraction of the geometric information that is being used for recognizing the pattern of the points is being accomplished via Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in user-specified neighborhoods in the whole point cloud. The implementation of PCA leads to the definition of the normal vector at each point of the cloud. Two tests that operate separately examine both local and global geometric criteria among the points and conclude which of them should be categorized as pathology. The proposed algorithm was tested on parts of the Gazi Evrenos Baths masonry, which are located at the city of Giannitsa at Northern Greece.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 657-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryuji Miyazaki ◽  
Makoto Yamamoto ◽  
Koichi Harada ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

We propose a line-based region growing method for extracting planar regions with precise boundaries from a point cloud with an anisotropic distribution. Planar structure extraction from point clouds is an important process in many applications, such as maintenance of infrastructure components including roads and curbstones, because most artificial structures consist of planar surfaces. A mobile mapping system (MMS) is able to obtain a large number of points while traveling at a standard speed. However, if a high-end laser scanning system is equipped, the point cloud has an anisotropic distribution. In traditional point-based methods, this causes problems when calculating geometric information using neighboring points. In the proposed method, the precise boundary of a planar structure is maintained by appropriately creating line segments from an input point cloud. Furthermore, a normal vector at a line segment is precisely estimated for the region growing process. An experiment using the point cloud from an MMS simulation indicates that the proposed method extracts planar regions accurately. Additionally, we apply the proposed method to several real point clouds and evaluate its effectiveness via visual inspection.


Author(s):  
A. Kumar ◽  
K. Anders ◽  
L Winiwarter ◽  
B. Höfle

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> 3D point clouds acquired by laser scanning and other techniques are difficult to interpret because of their irregular structure. To make sense of this data and to allow for the derivation of useful information, a segmentation of the points in groups, units, or classes fit for the specific use case is required. In this paper, we present a non-end-to-end deep learning classifier for 3D point clouds using multiple sets of input features and compare it with an implementation of the state-of-the-art deep learning framework PointNet++. We first start by extracting features derived from the local normal vector (normal vectors, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors) from the point cloud, and study the result of classification for different local search radii. We extract additional features related to spatial point distribution and use them together with the normal vector-based features. We find that the classification accuracy improves by up to 33% as we include normal vector features with multiple search radii and features related to spatial point distribution. Our method achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 94% outperforming PointNet++’s Multi Scale Grouping by up to 12%. The study presents the importance of multiple search radii for different point cloud features for classification in an urban 3D point cloud scene acquired by terrestrial laser scanning.</p>


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