scholarly journals IMAGE TO POINT CLOUD TRANSLATION USING CONDITIONAL GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORK FOR AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA

Author(s):  
T. Shinohara ◽  
H. Xiu ◽  
M. Matsuoka

Abstract. This study introduces a novel image to a 3D point-cloud translation method with a conditional generative adversarial network that creates a large-scale 3D point cloud. This can generate supervised point clouds observed via airborne LiDAR from aerial images. The network is composed of an encoder to produce latent features of input images, generator to translate latent features to fake point clouds, and discriminator to classify false or real point clouds. The encoder is a pre-trained ResNet; to overcome the difficulty of generating 3D point clouds in an outdoor scene, we use a FoldingNet with features from ResNet. After a fixed number of iterations, our generator can produce fake point clouds that correspond to the input image. Experimental results show that our network can learn and generate certain point clouds using the data from the 2018 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (22) ◽  
pp. 7558
Author(s):  
Linyan Cui ◽  
Guolong Zhang ◽  
Jinshen Wang

For the engineering application of manipulator grasping objects, mechanical arm occlusion and limited imaging angle produce various holes in the reconstructed 3D point clouds of objects. Acquiring a complete point cloud model of the grasped object plays a very important role in the subsequent task planning of the manipulator. This paper proposes a method with which to automatically detect and repair the holes in the 3D point cloud model of symmetrical objects grasped by the manipulator. With the established virtual camera coordinate system and boundary detection, repair and classification of holes, the closed boundaries for the nested holes were detected and classified into two kinds, which correspond to the mechanical claw holes caused by mechanical arm occlusion and the missing surface produced by limited imaging angle. These two kinds of holes were repaired based on surface reconstruction and object symmetry. Experiments on simulated and real point cloud models demonstrate that our approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art 3D point cloud hole repair algorithms.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (18) ◽  
pp. 5029
Author(s):  
Jingdao Chen ◽  
John Seon Keun Yi ◽  
Mark Kahoush ◽  
Erin S. Cho ◽  
Yong K. Cho

Collecting 3D point cloud data of buildings is important for many applications such as urban mapping, renovation, preservation, and energy simulation. However, laser-scanned point clouds are often difficult to analyze, visualize, and interpret due to incompletely scanned building facades caused by numerous sources of defects such as noise, occlusions, and moving objects. Several point cloud scene completion algorithms have been proposed in the literature, but they have been mostly applied to individual objects or small-scale indoor environments and not on large-scale scans of building facades. This paper introduces a method of performing point cloud scene completion of building facades using orthographic projection and generative adversarial inpainting methods. The point cloud is first converted into the 2D structured representation of depth and color images using an orthographic projection approach. Then, a data-driven 2D inpainting approach is used to predict the complete version of the scene, given the incomplete scene in the image domain. The 2D inpainting process is fully automated and uses a customized generative-adversarial network based on Pix2Pix that is trainable end-to-end. The inpainted 2D image is finally converted back into a 3D point cloud using depth remapping. The proposed method is compared against several baseline methods, including geometric methods such as Poisson reconstruction and hole-filling, as well as learning-based methods such as the point completion network (PCN) and TopNet. Performance evaluation is carried out based on the task of reconstructing real-world building facades from partial laser-scanned point clouds. Experimental results using the performance metrics of voxel precision, voxel recall, position error, and color error showed that the proposed method has the best performance overall.


Aerospace ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hriday Bavle ◽  
Jose Sanchez-Lopez ◽  
Paloma Puente ◽  
Alejandro Rodriguez-Ramos ◽  
Carlos Sampedro ◽  
...  

This paper presents a fast and robust approach for estimating the flight altitude of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) using 3D point cloud sensors in cluttered, unstructured, and dynamic indoor environments. The objective is to present a flight altitude estimation algorithm, replacing the conventional sensors such as laser altimeters, barometers, or accelerometers, which have several limitations when used individually. Our proposed algorithm includes two stages: in the first stage, a fast clustering of the measured 3D point cloud data is performed, along with the segmentation of the clustered data into horizontal planes. In the second stage, these segmented horizontal planes are mapped based on the vertical distance with respect to the point cloud sensor frame of reference, in order to provide a robust flight altitude estimation even in presence of several static as well as dynamic ground obstacles. We validate our approach using the IROS 2011 Kinect dataset available in the literature, estimating the altitude of the RGB-D camera using the provided 3D point clouds. We further validate our approach using a point cloud sensor on board a UAV, by means of several autonomous real flights, closing its altitude control loop using the flight altitude estimated by our proposed method, in presence of several different static as well as dynamic ground obstacles. In addition, the implementation of our approach has been integrated in our open-source software framework for aerial robotics called Aerostack.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1875 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jingwei Zhu ◽  
Joachim Gehrung ◽  
Rong Huang ◽  
Björn Borgmann ◽  
Zhenghao Sun ◽  
...  

In the past decade, a vast amount of strategies, methods, and algorithms have been developed to explore the semantic interpretation of 3D point clouds for extracting desirable information. To assess the performance of the developed algorithms or methods, public standard benchmark datasets should invariably be introduced and used, which serve as an indicator and ruler in the evaluation and comparison. In this work, we introduce and present large-scale Mobile LiDAR point clouds acquired at the city campus of the Technical University of Munich, which have been manually annotated and can be used for the evaluation of related algorithms and methods for semantic point cloud interpretation. We created three datasets from a measurement campaign conducted in April 2016, including a benchmark dataset for semantic labeling, test data for instance segmentation, and test data for annotated single 360 ° laser scans. These datasets cover an urban area of approximately 1 km long roadways and include more than 40 million annotated points with eight classes of objects labeled. Moreover, experiments were carried out with results from several baseline methods compared and analyzed, revealing the quality of this dataset and its effectiveness when using it for performance evaluation.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 6815
Author(s):  
Cheng Yi ◽  
Dening Lu ◽  
Qian Xie ◽  
Jinxuan Xu ◽  
Jun Wang

Global inspection of large-scale tunnels is a fundamental yet challenging task to ensure the structural stability of tunnels and driving safety. Advanced LiDAR scanners, which sample tunnels into 3D point clouds, are making their debut in the Tunnel Deformation Inspection (TDI). However, the acquired raw point clouds inevitably possess noticeable occlusions, missing areas, and noise/outliers. Considering the tunnel as a geometrical sweeping feature, we propose an effective tunnel deformation inspection algorithm by extracting the global spatial axis from the poor-quality raw point cloud. Essentially, we convert tunnel axis extraction into an iterative fitting optimization problem. Specifically, given the scanned raw point cloud of a tunnel, the initial design axis is sampled to generate a series of normal planes within the corresponding Frenet frame, followed by intersecting those planes with the tunnel point cloud to yield a sequence of cross sections. By fitting cross sections with circles, the fitted circle centers are approximated with a B-Spline curve, which is considered as an updated axis. The procedure of “circle fitting and B-SPline approximation” repeats iteratively until convergency, that is, the distance of each fitted circle center to the current axis is smaller than a given threshold. By this means, the spatial axis of the tunnel can be accurately obtained. Subsequently, according to the practical mechanism of tunnel deformation, we design a segmentation approach to partition cross sections into meaningful pieces, based on which various inspection parameters can be automatically computed regarding to tunnel deformation. A variety of practical experiments have demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our inspection method.


Author(s):  
Wenju Wang ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
Yu Cai

AbstractClassifying 3D point clouds is an important and challenging task in computer vision. Currently, classification methods using multiple views lose characteristic or detail information during the representation or processing of views. For this reason, we propose a multi-view attention-convolution pooling network framework for 3D point cloud classification tasks. This framework uses Res2Net to extract the features from multiple 2D views. Our attention-convolution pooling method finds more useful information in the input data related to the current output, effectively solving the problem of feature information loss caused by feature representation and the detail information loss during dimensionality reduction. Finally, we obtain the probability distribution of the model to be classified using a full connection layer and the softmax function. The experimental results show that our framework achieves higher classification accuracy and better performance than other contemporary methods using the ModelNet40 dataset.


Author(s):  
G. Stavropoulou ◽  
G. Tzovla ◽  
A. Georgopoulos

Over the past decade, large-scale photogrammetric products have been extensively used for the geometric documentation of cultural heritage monuments, as they combine metric information with the qualities of an image document. Additionally, the rising technology of terrestrial laser scanning has enabled the easier and faster production of accurate digital surface models (DSM), which have in turn contributed to the documentation of heavily textured monuments. However, due to the required accuracy of control points, the photogrammetric methods are always applied in combination with surveying measurements and hence are dependent on them. Along this line of thought, this paper explores the possibility of limiting the surveying measurements and the field work necessary for the production of large-scale photogrammetric products and proposes an alternative method on the basis of which the necessary control points instead of being measured with surveying procedures are chosen from a dense and accurate point cloud. Using this point cloud also as a surface model, the only field work necessary is the scanning of the object and image acquisition, which need not be subject to strict planning. To evaluate the proposed method an algorithm and the complementary interface were produced that allow the parallel manipulation of 3D point clouds and images and through which single image procedures take place. The paper concludes by presenting the results of a case study in the ancient temple of Hephaestus in Athens and by providing a set of guidelines for implementing effectively the method.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-53
Author(s):  
Sinh Van Nguyen ◽  
Ha Manh Tran ◽  
Minh Khai Tran

Building 3D objects or reconstructing their surfaces from 3D point cloud data are researched activities in the field of geometric modeling and computer graphics. In the recent years, they are also studied and used in some fields such as: graph models and simulation; image processing or restoration of digital heritages. This article presents an improved method for restoring the shape of 3D point cloud surfaces. The method is a combination of creating a Bezier surface patch and computing tangent plane of 3D points to fill holes on a surface of 3D point clouds. This method is described as follows: at first, a boundary for each hole on the surface is identified. The holes are then filled by computing Bezier curves of surface patches to find missing points. After that, the holes are refined based on two steps (rough and elaborate) to adjust the inserted points and preserve the local curvature of the holes. The contribution of the proposed method has been shown in processing time and the novelty of combined computation in this method has preserved the initial shape of the surface


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 143
Author(s):  
Yubo Cui ◽  
Zheng Fang ◽  
Sifan Zhou

Person tracking is an important issue in both computer vision and robotics. However, most existing person tracking methods using 3D point cloud are based on the Bayesian Filtering framework which are not robust in challenging scenes. In contrast with the filtering methods, in this paper, we propose a neural network to cope with person tracking using only 3D point cloud, named Point Siamese Network (PSN). PSN consists of two input branches named template and search, respectively. After finding the target person (by reading the label or using a detector), we get the inputs of the two branches and create feature spaces for them using feature extraction network. Meanwhile, a similarity map based on the feature space is proposed between them. We can obtain the target person from the map. Furthermore, we add an attention module to the template branch to guide feature extraction. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we compare it with the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) on 3 custom labeled challenging scenes and the KITTI dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than UKF in robustness and accuracy and has a real-time speed. In addition, we publicly release our collected dataset and the labeled sequences to the research community.


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