scholarly journals EFFICIENT LARGE-SCALE AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA CLASSIFICATION VIA FULLY CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK

Author(s):  
E. Maset ◽  
B. Padova ◽  
A. Fusiello

Abstract. Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing availability of large-scale airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data, that greatly improve our knowledge of urban areas and natural environment. In order to extract useful information from these massive point clouds, appropriate data processing is required, including point cloud classification. In this paper we present a deep learning method to efficiently perform the classification of large-scale LiDAR data, ensuring a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. The algorithm employs the projection of the point cloud into a two-dimensional image, where every pixel stores height, intensity, and echo information of the point falling in the pixel. The image is then segmented by a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), assigning a label to each pixel and, consequently, to the corresponding point. In particular, the proposed approach is applied to process a dataset of 7700 km2 that covers the entire Friuli Venezia Giulia region (Italy), allowing to distinguish among five classes (ground, vegetation, roof, overground and power line), with an overall accuracy of 92.9%.

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.


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.


Author(s):  
Shenman Zhang ◽  
Jie Shan ◽  
Zhichao Zhang ◽  
Jixing Yan ◽  
Yaolin Hou

A complete building model reconstruction needs data collected from both air and ground. The former often has sparse coverage on building façades, while the latter usually is unable to observe the building rooftops. Attempting to solve the missing data issues in building reconstruction from single data source, we describe an approach for complete building reconstruction that integrates airborne LiDAR data and ground smartphone imagery. First, by taking advantages of GPS and digital compass information embedded in the image metadata of smartphones, we are able to find airborne LiDAR point clouds for the corresponding buildings in the images. In the next step, Structure-from-Motion and dense multi-view stereo algorithms are applied to generate building point cloud from multiple ground images. The third step extracts building outlines respectively from the LiDAR point cloud and the ground image point cloud. An automated correspondence between these two sets of building outlines allows us to achieve a precise registration and combination of the two point clouds, which ultimately results in a complete and full resolution building model. The developed approach overcomes the problem of sparse points on building façades in airborne LiDAR and the deficiency of rooftops in ground images such that the merits of both datasets are utilized.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 450
Author(s):  
Zhen Ye ◽  
Yusheng Xu ◽  
Rong Huang ◽  
Xiaohua Tong ◽  
Xin Li ◽  
...  

The semantic labeling of the urban area is an essential but challenging task for a wide variety of applications such as mapping, navigation, and monitoring. The rapid advance in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems provides this task with a possible solution using 3D point clouds, which are accessible, affordable, accurate, and applicable. Among all types of platforms, the airborne platform with LiDAR can serve as an efficient and effective tool for large-scale 3D mapping in the urban area. Against this background, a large number of algorithms and methods have been developed to fully explore the potential of 3D point clouds. However, the creation of publicly accessible large-scale annotated datasets, which are critical for assessing the performance of the developed algorithms and methods, is still at an early age. In this work, we present a large-scale aerial LiDAR point cloud dataset acquired in a highly-dense and complex urban area for the evaluation of semantic labeling methods. This dataset covers an urban area with highly-dense buildings of approximately 1 km2 and includes more than three million points with five classes of objects labeled. Moreover, experiments are carried out with the results from several baseline methods, demonstrating the feasibility and capability of the dataset serving as a benchmark for assessing semantic labeling methods.


Author(s):  
S. Daniel ◽  
V. Dupont

Abstract. The benefit of autonomous vehicles in hydrography is largely based on the ability of these platforms to carry out survey campaigns in a fully autonomous manner. One solution is to have real-time processing onboard the survey vessel. To meet this real-time processing goal, deep learning based-models are favored. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) is booming, the main studies have been devoted to optical images and more recently, to LIDAR point clouds. However, little attention has been paid to the underwater environment. In this paper, we present an investigation into the adaptation of deep neural network to multi-beam echo-sounder (MBES) point cloud in order to classify sea-bottom morphology. More precisely, the paper investigates whether fully convolutional network can be trained while using the native 3D structure of the point cloud. A preprocessing approach is provided in order to overcome the lack of adequate training data. The results reported from the test data sets show the level of complexity related to natural, underwater terrain features where a classification accuracy no better than 65% can be reached when 2 micro topographic classes are used. Point density and resolution have a strong impact on the seabed morphology thereby affecting the classification scheme.


Author(s):  
Shenman Zhang ◽  
Jie Shan ◽  
Zhichao Zhang ◽  
Jixing Yan ◽  
Yaolin Hou

A complete building model reconstruction needs data collected from both air and ground. The former often has sparse coverage on building façades, while the latter usually is unable to observe the building rooftops. Attempting to solve the missing data issues in building reconstruction from single data source, we describe an approach for complete building reconstruction that integrates airborne LiDAR data and ground smartphone imagery. First, by taking advantages of GPS and digital compass information embedded in the image metadata of smartphones, we are able to find airborne LiDAR point clouds for the corresponding buildings in the images. In the next step, Structure-from-Motion and dense multi-view stereo algorithms are applied to generate building point cloud from multiple ground images. The third step extracts building outlines respectively from the LiDAR point cloud and the ground image point cloud. An automated correspondence between these two sets of building outlines allows us to achieve a precise registration and combination of the two point clouds, which ultimately results in a complete and full resolution building model. The developed approach overcomes the problem of sparse points on building façades in airborne LiDAR and the deficiency of rooftops in ground images such that the merits of both datasets are utilized.


Author(s):  
J. Niemeyer ◽  
F. Rottensteiner ◽  
U. Soergel ◽  
C. Heipke

We propose a novel hierarchical approach for the classification of airborne 3D lidar points. Spatial and semantic context is incorporated via a two-layer Conditional Random Field (CRF). The first layer operates on a point level and utilises higher order cliques. Segments are generated from the labelling obtained in this way. They are the entities of the second layer, which incorporates larger scale context. The classification result of the segments is introduced as an energy term for the next iteration of the point-based layer. This framework iterates and mutually propagates context to improve the classification results. Potentially wrong decisions can be revised at later stages. The output is a labelled point cloud as well as segments roughly corresponding to object instances. Moreover, we present two new contextual features for the segment classification: the <i>distance</i> and the <i>orientation of a segment with respect to the closest road</i>. It is shown that the classification benefits from these features. In our experiments the hierarchical framework improve the overall accuracies by 2.3% on a point-based level and by 3.0% on a segment-based level, respectively, compared to a purely point-based classification.


Author(s):  
Y. Gao ◽  
M. C. Li

Abstract. Airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) has become an important means for efficient and high-precision acquisition of 3D spatial data of large scenes. It has important application value in digital cities and location-based services. The classification and identification of point cloud is the basis of its application, and it is also a hot and difficult problem in the field of geographic information science.The difficulty of LiDAR point cloud classification in large-scale urban scenes is: On the one hand, the urban scene LiDAR point cloud contains rich and complex features, many types of features, different shapes, complex structures, and mutual occlusion, resulting in large data loss; On the other hand, the LiDAR scanner is far away from the urban features, and is like a car, a pedestrian, etc., which is in motion during the scanning process, which causes a certain degree of data noise of the point cloud and uneven density of the point cloud.Aiming at the characteristics of LiDAR point cloud in urban scene.The main work of this paper implements a method based on the saliency dictionary and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model for LiDAR point cloud classification. The method uses the tag information of the training data and the tag source of each dictionary item to construct a significant dictionary learning model in sparse coding to expresses the feature of the point set more accurately.And it also uses the multi-path AdaBoost classifier to perform the features of the multi-level point set. The classification of point clouds is realized based on the supervised method. The experimental results show that the feature set extracted by the method combined with the multi-path classifier can significantly improve the cloud classification accuracy of complex city market attractions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3621
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ibrahim ◽  
Naveed Akhtar ◽  
Khalil Ullah ◽  
Ajmal Mian

Accurate semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds is a long-standing problem in remote sensing and computer vision. Due to the unstructured nature of point clouds, designing deep neural architectures for point cloud semantic segmentation is often not straightforward. In this work, we circumvent this problem by devising a technique to exploit structured neural architectures for unstructured data. In particular, we employ the popular convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures to perform semantic segmentation of LiDAR data. We propose a projection-based scheme that performs an angle-wise slicing of large 3D point clouds and transforms those slices into 2D grids. Accounting for intensity and reflectivity of the LiDAR input, the 2D grid allows us to construct a pseudo image for the point cloud slice. We enhance this image with low-level image processing techniques of normalization, histogram equalization, and decorrelation stretch to suit our ultimate object of semantic segmentation. A large number of images thus generated are used to induce an encoder-decoder CNN model that learns to compute a segmented 2D projection of the scene, which we finally back project to the 3D point cloud. In addition to a novel method, this article also makes a second major contribution of introducing the enhanced version of our large-scale public PC-Urban outdoor dataset which is captured in a civic setup with an Ouster LiDAR sensor. The updated dataset (PC-Urban_V2) provides nearly 8 billion points including over 100 million points labeled for 25 classes of interest. We provide a thorough evaluation of our technique on PC-Urban_V2 and three other public datasets.


Author(s):  
J. Niemeyer ◽  
F. Rottensteiner ◽  
U. Soergel ◽  
C. Heipke

We propose a novel hierarchical approach for the classification of airborne 3D lidar points. Spatial and semantic context is incorporated via a two-layer Conditional Random Field (CRF). The first layer operates on a point level and utilises higher order cliques. Segments are generated from the labelling obtained in this way. They are the entities of the second layer, which incorporates larger scale context. The classification result of the segments is introduced as an energy term for the next iteration of the point-based layer. This framework iterates and mutually propagates context to improve the classification results. Potentially wrong decisions can be revised at later stages. The output is a labelled point cloud as well as segments roughly corresponding to object instances. Moreover, we present two new contextual features for the segment classification: the <i>distance</i> and the <i>orientation of a segment with respect to the closest road</i>. It is shown that the classification benefits from these features. In our experiments the hierarchical framework improve the overall accuracies by 2.3% on a point-based level and by 3.0% on a segment-based level, respectively, compared to a purely point-based classification.


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