scholarly journals STRUCTURAL SEGMENTATION OF POINT CLOUDS WITH VARYING DENSITY BASED ON MULTI-SIZE SUPERVOXELS

Author(s):  
Y. Li ◽  
B. Wu

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Ground objects can be regarded as a combination of structures of different geometries. Generally, the structural geometries can be grouped into linear, planar and scatter shapes. A good segmentation of objects into different structures can help to interpret the scanned scenes and provide essential clues for subsequent semantic interpretation. This is particularly true for the terrestrial static and mobile laser scanning data, where the geometric structures of objects are presented in detail due to the close scanning distances. In consideration of the large data volume and the large variation in point density of such point clouds, this paper presents a structural segmentation method of point clouds to efficiently decompose the ground objects into different structural components based on supervoxels of multiple sizes. First, supervoxels are generated with sizes adaptive to the point density with minimum occupied points and minimum size constraints. Then, the multi-size supervoxels are clustered into different components based on a structural labelling result obtained via Markov random field. Two datasets including terrestrial and mobile laser scanning point clouds were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method can effectively and efficiently classify the point clouds into structurally meaningful segments with overall accuracies higher than 96%, even with largely varying point density.</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2135
Author(s):  
Jesús Balado ◽  
Pedro Arias ◽  
Henrique Lorenzo ◽  
Adrián Meijide-Rodríguez

Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems have proven their usefulness in the rapid and accurate acquisition of the urban environment. From the generated point clouds, street furniture can be extracted and classified without manual intervention. However, this process of acquisition and classification is not error-free, caused mainly by disturbances. This paper analyses the effect of three disturbances (point density variation, ambient noise, and occlusions) on the classification of urban objects in point clouds. From point clouds acquired in real case studies, synthetic disturbances are generated and added. The point density reduction is generated by downsampling in a voxel-wise distribution. The ambient noise is generated as random points within the bounding box of the object, and the occlusion is generated by eliminating points contained in a sphere. Samples with disturbances are classified by a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The results showed different behaviours for each disturbance: density reduction affected objects depending on the object shape and dimensions, ambient noise depending on the volume of the object, while occlusions depended on their size and location. Finally, the CNN was re-trained with a percentage of synthetic samples with disturbances. An improvement in the performance of 10–40% was reported except for occlusions with a radius larger than 1 m.


Author(s):  
Z. Lari ◽  
K. Al-Durgham ◽  
A. Habib

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) systems have been established as a leading tool for the acquisition of high density three-dimensional point clouds from physical objects. The collected point clouds by these systems can be utilized for a wide spectrum of object extraction, modelling, and monitoring applications. Pole-like features are among the most important objects that can be extracted from TLS data especially those acquired in urban areas and industrial sites. However, these features cannot be completely extracted and modelled using a single TLS scan due to significant local point density variations and occlusions caused by the other objects. Therefore, multiple TLS scans from different perspectives should be integrated through a registration procedure to provide a complete coverage of the pole-like features in a scene. To date, different segmentation approaches have been proposed for the extraction of pole-like features from either single or multiple-registered TLS scans. These approaches do not consider the internal characteristics of a TLS point cloud (local point density variations and noise level in data) and usually suffer from computational inefficiency. To overcome these problems, two recently-developed PCA-based parameter-domain and spatial-domain approaches for the segmentation of pole-like features are introduced, in this paper. Moreover, the performance of the proposed segmentation approaches for the extraction of pole-like features from a single or multiple-registered TLS scans is investigated in this paper. The alignment of the utilized TLS scans is implemented using an Iterative Closest Projected Point (ICPP) registration procedure. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the extracted pole-like features from single and multiple-registered TLS scans, using both of the proposed segmentation approaches, is conducted to verify the extraction of more complete pole-like features using multipleregistered TLS scans.


Author(s):  
G. Tran ◽  
D. Nguyen ◽  
M. Milenkovic ◽  
N. Pfeifer

Full-waveform (FWF) LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems have their advantage in recording the entire backscattered signal of each emitted laser pulse compared to conventional airborne discrete-return laser scanner systems. The FWF systems can provide point clouds which contain extra attributes like amplitude and echo width, etc. In this study, a FWF data collected in 2010 for Eisenstadt, a city in the eastern part of Austria was used to classify four main classes: buildings, trees, waterbody and ground by employing a decision tree. Point density, echo ratio, echo width, normalised digital surface model and point cloud roughness are the main inputs for classification. The accuracy of the final results, correctness and completeness measures, were assessed by comparison of the classified output to a knowledge-based labelling of the points. Completeness and correctness between 90% and 97% was reached, depending on the class. While such results and methods were presented before, we are investigating additionally the transferability of the classification method (features, thresholds …) to another urban FWF lidar point cloud. Our conclusions are that from the features used, only echo width requires new thresholds. A data-driven adaptation of thresholds is suggested.


Author(s):  
P. Hu ◽  
Y. Liu ◽  
M. Tian ◽  
M. Hou

Abstract. Plane segmentation from the point cloud is an important step in various types of geo-information related to human activities. In this paper, we present a new approach to accurate segment planar primitives simultaneously by transforming it into the best matching issue between the over-segmented super-voxels and the 3D plane models. The super-voxels and its adjacent topological graph are firstly derived from the input point cloud as over-segmented small patches. Such initial 3D plane models are then enriched by fitting centroids of randomly sampled super-voxels, and translating these grouped planar super-voxels by structured scene prior (e.g. orthogonality, parallelism), while the generated adjacent graph will be updated along with planar clustering. To achieve the final super-voxels to planes assignment problem, an energy minimization framework is constructed using the productions of candidate planes, initial super-voxels, and the improved adjacent graph, and optimized to segment multiple consistent planar surfaces in the scenes simultaneously. The proposed algorithms are implemented, and three types of point clouds differing in feature characteristics (e.g. point density, complexity) are mainly tested to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our segmentation method.


Author(s):  
F. Li ◽  
S. Oude Elberink ◽  
G. Vosselman

Automatic semantic interpretation of street furniture has become a popular topic in recent years. Current studies detect street furniture as connected components of points above the street level. Street furniture classification based on properties of such components suffers from large intra class variability of shapes and cannot deal with mixed classes like traffic signs attached to light poles. In this paper, we focus on the decomposition of point clouds of pole-like street furniture. A novel street furniture decomposition method is proposed, which consists of three steps: (i) acquirement of prior-knowledge, (ii) pole extraction, (iii) components separation. For the pole extraction, a novel global pole extraction approach is proposed to handle 3 different cases of street furniture. In the evaluation of results, which involves the decomposition of 27 different instances of street furniture, we demonstrate that our method decomposes mixed classes street furniture into poles and different components with respect to different functionalities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 354-362
Author(s):  
Jacek Sztubecki ◽  
Adam Bujarkiewicz ◽  
Karol Derejczyk ◽  
Michał Przytuła

AbstractModern measuring technologies give the means to perform tasks previously impossible with conventional methods. Their main advantages include reduced time consumption and higher measurement precision. Contemporary displacement and deformation studies of engineering structures often involve application of laser technologies, which are characterised by high precision of measurements. This article presents an analysis of results obtained from measurements of changes in the geometry of an engineering structure in which two complementary measuring technologies were used, i.e. tachymetric measurement with a Leica TDRA6000 laser station and laser scanning with a 3D FARO Focus S150 scanner. The utilised laser station enabled determination of 3D displacements in the local control point network installed on the studied structure as well as transfer of point clouds obtained from laser scans into a uniform coordinate system. The hybrid technology employed and the measurement method used ensured that the accuracy of the determined displacements and deformations of the structural components of the structure was high. The described measurement and result processing technology makes it possible to comprehensively analyse the geometric performance of structures, which consequently leads to the development of more complete conclusions concerning prevention of adverse effects of displacements and deformations in engineering structures.


Author(s):  
F. Li ◽  
S. Oude Elberink ◽  
G. Vosselman

Automatic semantic interpretation of street furniture has become a popular topic in recent years. Current studies detect street furniture as connected components of points above the street level. Street furniture classification based on properties of such components suffers from large intra class variability of shapes and cannot deal with mixed classes like traffic signs attached to light poles. In this paper, we focus on the decomposition of point clouds of pole-like street furniture. A novel street furniture decomposition method is proposed, which consists of three steps: (i) acquirement of prior-knowledge, (ii) pole extraction, (iii) components separation. For the pole extraction, a novel global pole extraction approach is proposed to handle 3 different cases of street furniture. In the evaluation of results, which involves the decomposition of 27 different instances of street furniture, we demonstrate that our method decomposes mixed classes street furniture into poles and different components with respect to different functionalities.


Author(s):  
Hoang Long Nguyen ◽  
David Belton ◽  
Petra Helmholz

The demand for accurate spatial data has been increasing rapidly in recent years. Mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems have become a mainstream technology for measuring 3D spatial data. In a MLS point cloud, the point clouds densities of captured point clouds of interest features can vary: they can be sparse and heterogeneous or they can be dense. This is caused by several factors such as the speed of the carrier vehicle and the specifications of the laser scanner(s). The MLS point cloud data needs to be processed to get meaningful information e.g. segmentation can be used to find meaningful features (planes, corners etc.) that can be used as the inputs for many processing steps (e.g. registration, modelling) that are more difficult when just using the point cloud. Planar features are dominating in manmade environments and they are widely used in point clouds registration and calibration processes. There are several approaches for segmentation and extraction of planar objects available, however the proposed methods do not focus on properly segment MLS point clouds automatically considering the different point densities. This research presents the extension of the segmentation method based on planarity of the features. This proposed method was verified using both simulated and real MLS point cloud datasets. The results show that planar objects in MLS point clouds can be properly segmented and extracted by the proposed segmentation method.


Author(s):  
R. Honma ◽  
H. Date ◽  
S. Kanai

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Point clouds acquired using Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) are applied to extract road information such as curb stones, road markings, and road side objects. In this paper, we present a scanline-based MLS point cloud segmentation method for various road and road side objects. First, end points of the scanline, jump edge points, and corner points are extracted as feature points. The feature points are then interpolated to accurately extract irregular parts consisting of irregularly distributed points such as vegetation. Next, using a point reduction method, additional feature points on a smooth surface are extracted for segmentation at the edges of the curb cut. Finally, points between the feature points are extracted as flat segments on the scanline, and continuing feature points are extracted as irregular segments on the scanline. Furthermore, these segments on the scanline are integrated as flat or irregular regions. In the extraction of the feature points, neighboring points based on the spatial distance are used to avoid being influenced by the difference in the point density. Based on experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method was indicated based on an application to an MLS point cloud.</p>


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