scholarly journals Large-Scale ALS Data Semantic Classification Integrating Location-Context-Semantics Cues by Higher-Order CRF

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1700
Author(s):  
Wei Han ◽  
Ruisheng Wang ◽  
Daqing Huang ◽  
Cheng Xu

We designed a location-context-semantics-based conditional random field (LCS-CRF) framework for the semantic classification of airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds. For ALS datasets of high spatial resolution but with severe noise pollutions, more contexture and semantics cues, besides location information, can be exploited to surmount the decrease of discrimination of features for classification. This paper mainly focuses on the semantic classification of ALS data using mixed location-context-semantics cues, which are integrated into a higher-order CRF framework by modeling the probabilistic potentials. The location cues modeled by the unary potentials can provide basic information for discriminating the various classes. The pairwise potentials consider the spatial contextual information by establishing the neighboring interactions between points to favor spatial smoothing. The semantics cues are explicitly encoded in the higher-order potentials. The higher-order potential operates at the clusters level with similar geometric and radiometric properties, guaranteeing the classification accuracy based on semantic rules. To demonstrate the performance of our approach, two standard benchmark datasets were utilized. Experiments show that our method achieves superior classification results with an overall accuracy of 83.1% on the Vaihingen Dataset and an overall accuracy of 94.3% on the Graphics and Media Lab (GML) Dataset A compared with other classification algorithms in the literature.

Author(s):  
S. Guinard ◽  
L. Landrieu

We consider the problem of the semantic classification of 3D LiDAR point clouds obtained from urban scenes when the training set is limited. We propose a non-parametric segmentation model for urban scenes composed of anthropic objects of simple shapes, partionning the scene into geometrically-homogeneous segments which size is determined by the local complexity. This segmentation can be integrated into a conditional random field classifier (CRF) in order to capture the high-level structure of the scene. For each cluster, this allows us to aggregate the noisy predictions of a weakly-supervised classifier to produce a higher confidence data term. We demonstrate the improvement provided by our method over two publicly-available large-scale data sets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Jarząbek-Rychard ◽  
Dong Lin ◽  
Hans-Gerd Maas

Targeted energy management and control is becoming an increasing concern in the building sector. Automatic analyses of thermal data, which minimize the subjectivity of the assessment and allow for large-scale inspections, are therefore of high interest. In this study, we propose an approach for a supervised extraction of façade openings (windows and doors) from photogrammetric 3D point clouds attributed to RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) information. The novelty of the proposed approach is in the combination of thermal information with other available characteristics of data for a classification performed directly in 3D space. Images acquired in visible and thermal infrared spectra serve as input data for the camera pose estimation and the reconstruction of 3D scene geometry. To investigate the relevance of different information types to the classification performance, a Random Forest algorithm is applied to various sets of computed features. The best feature combination is then used as an input for a Conditional Random Field that enables us to incorporate contextual information and consider the interaction between the points. The evaluation executed on a per-point level shows that the fusion of all available information types together with context consideration allows us to extract objects with 90% completeness and 95% correctness. A respective assessment executed on a per-object level shows 97% completeness and 88% accuracy.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tran Thanh Ha ◽  
Taweep Chaisomphob

Mobile LiDAR is an emerging advanced technology for capturing three-dimensional road information at a large scale effectively and precisely. Pole-like road facilities are crucial street infrastructures as they provide valuable information for road mapping and road inventory. Thus, the automated localization and classification of road facilities are necessary. This paper proposes a voxel-based method to detect and classify pole-like objects in an expressway environment based on the spatially independent and vertical height continuity analysis. First, the ground points are eliminated, and the nonground points are merged into clusters. Second, the pole-like objects are extracted using horizontal cross section analysis and minimum vertical height criteria. Finally, a set of knowledge-based rules, which comprise height features and geometric shape, is constructed to classify the detected road poles into different types of road facilities. Two test sites of point clouds in an expressway environment, which are located in Bangkok, Thailand, are used to assess the proposed method. The proposed method extracts the pole-like road facilities from two datasets with a detection rate of 95.1% and 93.5% and an overall quality of 89.7% and 98.0% in the classification stage, respectively. This shows that the algorithm could be a promising alternative for the localization and classification of pole-like road facilities with acceptable accuracy.


Author(s):  
F. Pirotti ◽  
F. Tonion

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> In this investigation a comparison between two machine learning (ML) models for semantic classification of an aerial laser scanner point cloud is presented. One model is Random Forest (RF), the other is a multi-layer neural network, TensorFlow (TF). Accuracy results were compared over a growing set of training data, using a stratified independent sampling over classes from 5% to 50% of the total dataset. Results show RF to have average F1&amp;thinsp;=&amp;thinsp;0.823 for the 9 classes considered, whereas TF had average F1&amp;thinsp;=&amp;thinsp;0.450. F1 values where higher for RF than TF, due to complexity in the determination of a suitable composition of the hidden layers of the neural network in TF, and this can likely be improved to reach higher accuracy values. Further study in this sense is planned.</p>


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.


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.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 3347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhishuang Yang ◽  
Bo Tan ◽  
Huikun Pei ◽  
Wanshou Jiang

The classification of point clouds is a basic task in airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud processing. It is quite a challenge when facing complex observed scenes and irregular point distributions. In order to reduce the computational burden of the point-based classification method and improve the classification accuracy, we present a segmentation and multi-scale convolutional neural network-based classification method. Firstly, a three-step region-growing segmentation method was proposed to reduce both under-segmentation and over-segmentation. Then, a feature image generation method was used to transform the 3D neighborhood features of a point into a 2D image. Finally, feature images were treated as the input of a multi-scale convolutional neural network for training and testing tasks. In order to obtain performance comparisons with existing approaches, we evaluated our framework using the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Working Groups II/4 (ISPRS WG II/4) 3D labeling benchmark tests. The experiment result, which achieved 84.9% overall accuracy and 69.2% of average F1 scores, has a satisfactory performance over all participating approaches analyzed.


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