scholarly journals An Efficient Encoding Voxel-Based Segmentation (EVBS) Algorithm Based on Fast Adjacent Voxel Search for Point Cloud Plane Segmentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2727 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming Huang ◽  
Pengcheng Wei ◽  
Xianglei Liu

Plane segmentation is a basic yet important process in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud processing. The traditional point cloud plane segmentation algorithm is typically affected by the number of point clouds and the noise data, which results in slow segmentation efficiency and poor segmentation effect. Hence, an efficient encoding voxel-based segmentation (EVBS) algorithm based on a fast adjacent voxel search is proposed in this study. First, a binary octree algorithm is proposed to construct the voxel as the segmentation object and code the voxel, which can compute voxel features quickly and accurately. Second, a voxel-based region growing algorithm is proposed to cluster the corresponding voxel to perform the initial point cloud segmentation, which can improve the rationality of seed selection. Finally, a refining point method is proposed to solve the problem of under-segmentation in unlabeled voxels by judging the relationship between the points and the segmented plane. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is better than the traditional algorithm in terms of computation time, extraction accuracy, and recall rate.

Author(s):  
R. Boerner ◽  
L. Hoegner ◽  
U. Stilla

Point cloud segmentation and classification is currently a research highlight. Methods in this field create labelled data, where each point has additional class information. Current approaches are to generate a graph on the basis of all points in the point cloud, calculate or learn descriptors and train a matcher for the descriptor to the corresponding classes. Since these approaches need to look on each point in the point cloud iteratively, they result in long calculation times for large point clouds. Therefore, large point clouds need a generalization, to save computation time. One kind of generalization is to cluster the raw points into a 3D grid structure, which is represented by small volume units ( i.e. voxels) used for further processing. This paper introduces a method to use such a voxel structure to cluster a large point cloud into ground and non-ground points. The proposed method for ground detection first marks ground voxels with a region growing approach. In a second step non ground voxels are searched and filtered in the ground segment to reduce effects of over-segmentations. This filter uses the probability that a voxel mostly consist of last pulses and a discrete gradient in a local neighbourhood . The result is the ground label as a first classification result and connected segments of non-ground points. The test area of the river Mangfall in Bavaria, Germany, is used for the first processing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 1019-1027
Author(s):  
Ali Saglam ◽  
Hasan B. Makineci ◽  
Ömer K. Baykan ◽  
Nurdan Akhan Baykan

Point cloud processing is a struggled field because the points in the clouds are three-dimensional and irregular distributed signals. For this reason, the points in the point clouds are mostly sampled into regularly distributed voxels in the literature. Voxelization as a pretreatment significantly accelerates the process of segmenting surfaces. The geometric cues such as plane directions (normals) in the voxels are mostly used to segment the local surfaces. However, the sampling process may include a non-planar point group (patch), which is mostly on the edges and corners, in a voxel. These voxels can cause misleading the segmentation process. In this paper, we separate the non-planar patches into planar sub-patches using k-means clustering. The largest one among the planar sub-patches replaces the normal and barycenter properties of the voxel with those of itself. We have tested this process in a successful point cloud segmentation method and measure the effects of the proposed method on two point cloud segmentation datasets (Mosque and Train Station). The method increases the accuracy success of the Mosque dataset from 83.84% to 87.86% and that of the Train Station dataset from 85.36% to 87.07%.


Author(s):  
M. Bassier ◽  
M. Bonduel ◽  
B. Van Genechten ◽  
M. Vergauwen

Point cloud segmentation is a crucial step in scene understanding and interpretation. The goal is to decompose the initial data into sets of workable clusters with similar properties. Additionally, it is a key aspect in the automated procedure from point cloud data to BIM. Current approaches typically only segment a single type of primitive such as planes or cylinders. Also, current algorithms suffer from oversegmenting the data and are often sensor or scene dependent.<br><br> In this work, a method is presented to automatically segment large unstructured point clouds of buildings. More specifically, the segmentation is formulated as a graph optimisation problem. First, the data is oversegmented with a greedy octree-based region growing method. The growing is conditioned on the segmentation of planes as well as smooth surfaces. Next, the candidate clusters are represented by a Conditional Random Field after which the most likely configuration of candidate clusters is computed given a set of local and contextual features. The experiments prove that the used method is a fast and reliable framework for unstructured point cloud segmentation. Processing speeds up to 40,000 points per second are recorded for the region growing. Additionally, the recall and precision of the graph clustering is approximately 80%. Overall, nearly 22% of oversegmentation is reduced by clustering the data. These clusters will be classified and used as a basis for the reconstruction of BIM models.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (15) ◽  
pp. 4209
Author(s):  
Dongbo Yu ◽  
Jun Xiao ◽  
Ying Wang

In respect of rock-mass engineering, the detection of planar structures from the rock-mass point clouds plays a crucial role in the construction of a lightweight numerical model, while the establishment of high-quality models relies on the accurate results of surface analysis. However, the existing techniques are barely capable to segment the rock mass thoroughly, which is attributed to the cluttered and unpredictable surface structures of the rock mass. This paper proposes a high-precision plane detection approach for 3D rock-mass point clouds, which is effective in dealing with the complex surface structures, thus achieving a high level of detail in detection. Firstly, the input point cloud is fast segmented to voxels using spatial grids, while the local coplanarity test and the edge information calculation are performed to extract the major segments of planes. Secondly, to preserve as much detail as possible, supervoxel segmentation instead of traditional region growing is conducted to deal with scattered points. Finally, a patch-based region growing strategy applicable to rock mass is developed, while the completed planes are obtained by merging supervoxel patches. In this paper, an artificial icosahedron point cloud and four rock-mass point clouds are applied to validate the performance of the proposed method. As indicated by the experimental results, the proposed method can make high-precision plane detection achievable for rock-mass point clouds while ensuring high recall rate. Furthermore, the results of both qualitative and quantitative analyses evidence the superior performance of our algorithm.


Author(s):  
Nan Luo ◽  
Yuanyuan Jiang ◽  
Quan Wang

Point cloud segmentation is a crucial fundamental step in 3D reconstruction, object recognition and scene understanding. This paper proposes a supervoxel-based point cloud segmentation algorithm in region growing principle to solve the issues of inaccurate boundaries and nonsmooth segments in the existing methods. To begin with, the input point cloud is voxelized and then pre-segmented into sparse supervoxels by flow constrained clustering, considering the spatial distance and local geometry between voxels. Afterwards, plane fitting is applied to the over-segmented supervoxels and seeds for region growing are selected with respect to the fitting residuals. Starting from pruned seed patches, adjacent supervoxels are merged in region growing style to form the final segments, according to the normalized similarity measure that integrates the smoothness and shape constraints of supervoxels. We determine the values of parameters via experimental tests, and the final results show that, by voxelizing and pre-segmenting the point clouds, the proposed algorithm is robust to noises and can obtain smooth segmentation regions with accurate boundaries in high efficiency.


Author(s):  
S. A. Guinard ◽  
Z. Mallé ◽  
O. Ennafii ◽  
P. Monasse ◽  
B. Vallet

Abstract. Detecting planar structures in point clouds is a very central step of the point cloud processing pipeline as many Lidar scans, in particular in anthropic environments, present such planar structures. Many improvements have been proposed to RANSAC and the Hough transform, the two major types of plane detection methods. An important limitation however is that these methods detect planes running across the whole scene instead of more localized planar patches. Moreover, they do not exploit the sensor information that often comes with Lidar point cloud (sensor topology and optical center position in particular). In this paper we address both issues: we aim at detecting planar polygons that have a limited spatial extent, and we exploit sensor topology. The latter is used to enhance a RANSAC framework on two aspects: to make seed points selection more local and to define more compact sets of inliers through sensor space region growing.


Author(s):  
D. Lin ◽  
Z. Dong ◽  
X. Zhang ◽  
H.-G. Maas

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The automatic extraction of windows from photogrammetric data has achieved increasing attention in recent times. An unsupervised windows extraction approach from photogrammetric point clouds with thermal attributes is proposed in this study. First, point cloud segmentation is conducted by a popular workflow: Multiscale supervoxel generation is applied to the image-based 3D point cloud, followed by region growing and energy optimization using spatial positions and thermal attributes of the raw points. Afterwards, an object-based feature (window index) is extracted using the average thermal attribute and the size of the object. Next, thresholding is applied to extract initial window regions. Finally, several criterions are applied to further refine the extraction results. For practical validation, the approach is evaluated on an art nouveau building row façade located at Dresden, Germany.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 1677 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Novo ◽  
Noelia Fariñas-Álvarez ◽  
Joaquin Martínez-Sánchez ◽  
Higinio González-Jorge ◽  
Henrique Lorenzo

The optimization of forest management in the surroundings of roads is a necessary task in term of wildfire prevention and the mitigation of their effects. One of the reasons why a forest fire spreads is the presence of contiguous flammable material, both horizontally and vertically and, thus, vegetation management becomes essential in preventive actions. This work presents a methodology to detect the continuity of vegetation based on aerial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds, in combination with point cloud processing techniques. Horizontal continuity is determined by calculating Cover Canopy Fraction (CCF). The results obtained show 50% of shrubs presence and 33% of trees presence in the selected case of study, with an error of 5.71%. Regarding vertical continuity, a forest structure composed of a single stratum represents 81% of the zone. In addition, the vegetation located in areas around the roads were mapped, taking into consideration the distances established in the applicable law. Analyses show that risky areas range from a total of 0.12 ha in a 2 m buffer and 0.48 ha in a 10 m buffer, representing a 2.4% and 9.5% of the total study area, respectively.


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.


Author(s):  
M. Bassier ◽  
R. Klein ◽  
B. Van Genechten ◽  
M. Vergauwen

The automated reconstruction of Building Information Modeling (BIM) objects from point cloud data is still ongoing research. A key aspect is the creation of accurate wall geometry as it forms the basis for further reconstruction of objects in a BIM. After segmenting and classifying the initial point cloud, the labelled segments are processed and the wall topology is reconstructed. However, the preocedure is challenging due to noise, occlusions and the complexity of the input data.<br>In this work, a method is presented to automatically reconstruct consistent wall geometry from point clouds. More specifically, the use of room information is proposed to aid the wall topology creation. First, a set of partial walls is constructed based on classified planar primitives. Next, the rooms are identified using the retrieved wall information along with the floors and ceilings. The wall topology is computed by the intersection of the partial walls conditioned on the room information. The final wall geometry is defined by creating IfcWallStandardCase objects conform the IFC4 standard. The result is a set of walls according to the as-built conditions of a building. The experiments prove that the used method is a reliable framework for wall reconstruction from unstructured point cloud data. Also, the implementation of room information reduces the rate of false positives for the wall topology. Given the walls, ceilings and floors, 94% of the rooms is correctly identified. A key advantage of the proposed method is that it deals with complex rooms and is not bound to single storeys.


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