scholarly journals Deep Learning Applied to Vegetation Identification and Removal Using Multidimensional Aerial Data

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6187
Author(s):  
Milena F. Pinto ◽  
Aurelio G. Melo ◽  
Leonardo M. Honório ◽  
André L. M. Marcato ◽  
André G. S. Conceição ◽  
...  

When performing structural inspection, the generation of three-dimensional (3D) point clouds is a common resource. Those are usually generated from photogrammetry or through laser scan techniques. However, a significant drawback for complete inspection is the presence of covering vegetation, hiding possible structural problems, and making difficult the acquisition of proper object surfaces in order to provide a reliable diagnostic. Therefore, this research’s main contribution is developing an effective vegetation removal methodology through the use of a deep learning structure that is capable of identifying and extracting covering vegetation in 3D point clouds. The proposed approach uses pre and post-processing filtering stages that take advantage of colored point clouds, if they are available, or operate independently. The results showed high classification accuracy and good effectiveness when compared with similar methods in the literature. After this step, if color is available, then a color filter is applied, enhancing the results obtained. Besides, the results are analyzed in light of real Structure From Motion (SFM) reconstruction data, which further validates the proposed method. This research also presented a colored point cloud library of bushes built for the work used by other studies in the field.

Author(s):  
E. S. Malinverni ◽  
R. Pierdicca ◽  
M. Paolanti ◽  
M. Martini ◽  
C. Morbidoni ◽  
...  

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Cultural Heritage is a testimony of past human activity, and, as such, its objects exhibit great variety in their nature, size and complexity; from small artefacts and museum items to cultural landscapes, from historical building and ancient monuments to city centers and archaeological sites. Cultural Heritage around the globe suffers from wars, natural disasters and human negligence. The importance of digital documentation is well recognized and there is an increasing pressure to document our heritage both nationally and internationally. For this reason, the three-dimensional scanning and modeling of sites and artifacts of cultural heritage have remarkably increased in recent years. The semantic segmentation of point clouds is an essential step of the entire pipeline; in fact, it allows to decompose complex architectures in single elements, which are then enriched with meaningful information within Building Information Modelling software. Notwithstanding, this step is very time consuming and completely entrusted on the manual work of domain experts, far from being automatized. This work describes a method to label and cluster automatically a point cloud based on a supervised Deep Learning approach, using a state-of-the-art Neural Network called PointNet++. Despite other methods are known, we have choose PointNet++ as it reached significant results for classifying and segmenting 3D point clouds. PointNet++ has been tested and improved, by training the network with annotated point clouds coming from a real survey and to evaluate how performance changes according to the input training data. It can result of great interest for the research community dealing with the point cloud semantic segmentation, since it makes public a labelled dataset of CH elements for further tests.</p>


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 884
Author(s):  
Chia-Ming Tsai ◽  
Yi-Horng Lai ◽  
Yung-Da Sun ◽  
Yu-Jen Chung ◽  
Jau-Woei Perng

Numerous sensors can obtain images or point cloud data on land, however, the rapid attenuation of electromagnetic signals and the lack of light in water have been observed to restrict sensing functions. This study expands the utilization of two- and three-dimensional detection technologies in underwater applications to detect abandoned tires. A three-dimensional acoustic sensor, the BV5000, is used in this study to collect underwater point cloud data. Some pre-processing steps are proposed to remove noise and the seabed from raw data. Point clouds are then processed to obtain two data types: a 2D image and a 3D point cloud. Deep learning methods with different dimensions are used to train the models. In the two-dimensional method, the point cloud is transferred into a bird’s eye view image. The Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3 network architectures are used to detect tires. Meanwhile, in the three-dimensional method, the point cloud associated with a tire is cut out from the raw data and is used as training data. The PointNet and PointConv network architectures are then used for tire classification. The results show that both approaches provide good accuracy.


Author(s):  
P.M.B. Torres ◽  
P. J. S. Gonçalves ◽  
J.M.M. Martins

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a robotic motion compensation system, using ultrasound images, to assist orthopedic surgery. The robotic system can compensate for femur movements during bone drilling procedures. Although it may have other applications, the system was thought to be used in hip resurfacing (HR) prosthesis surgery to implant the initial guide tool. The system requires no fiducial markers implanted in the patient, by using only non-invasive ultrasound images. Design/methodology/approach – The femur location in the operating room is obtained by processing ultrasound (USA) and computer tomography (CT) images, obtained, respectively, in the intra-operative and pre-operative scenarios. During surgery, the bone position and orientation is obtained by registration of USA and CT three-dimensional (3D) point clouds, using an optical measurement system and also passive markers attached to the USA probe and to the drill. The system description, image processing, calibration procedures and results with simulated and real experiments are presented and described to illustrate the system in operation. Findings – The robotic system can compensate for femur movements, during bone drilling procedures. In most experiments, the update was always validated, with errors of 2 mm/4°. Originality/value – The navigation system is based entirely on the information extracted from images obtained from CT pre-operatively and USA intra-operatively. Contrary to current surgical systems, it does not use any type of implant in the bone to track the femur movements.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 201
Author(s):  
Michael Bekele Maru ◽  
Donghwan Lee ◽  
Kassahun Demissie Tola ◽  
Seunghee Park

Modeling a structure in the virtual world using three-dimensional (3D) information enhances our understanding, while also aiding in the visualization, of how a structure reacts to any disturbance. Generally, 3D point clouds are used for determining structural behavioral changes. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is one of the crucial ways by which a 3D point cloud dataset can be generated. Additionally, 3D cameras are commonly used to develop a point cloud containing many points on the external surface of an object around it. The main objective of this study was to compare the performance of optical sensors, namely a depth camera (DC) and terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) in estimating structural deflection. We also utilized bilateral filtering techniques, which are commonly used in image processing, on the point cloud data for enhancing their accuracy and increasing the application prospects of these sensors in structure health monitoring. The results from these sensors were validated by comparing them with the outputs from a linear variable differential transformer sensor, which was mounted on the beam during an indoor experiment. The results showed that the datasets obtained from both the sensors were acceptable for nominal deflections of 3 mm and above because the error range was less than ±10%. However, the result obtained from the TLS were better than those obtained from the DC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 283-293
Author(s):  
Wei Wang ◽  
Yuan Xu ◽  
Yingchao Ren ◽  
Gang Wang

Recently, performance improvement in facade parsing from 3D point clouds has been brought about by designing more complex network structures, which cost huge computing resources and do not take full advantage of prior knowledge of facade structure. Instead, from the perspective of data distribution, we construct a new hierarchical mesh multi-view data domain based on the characteristics of facade objects to achieve fusion of deep-learning models and prior knowledge, thereby significantly improving segmentation accuracy. We comprehensively evaluate the current mainstream method on the RueMonge 2014 data set and demonstrate the superiority of our method. The mean intersection-over-union index on the facade-parsing task reached 76.41%, which is 2.75% higher than the current best result. In addition, through comparative experiments, the reasons for the performance improvement of the proposed method are further analyzed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Immacolata Marzulli ◽  
Pasi Raumonen ◽  
Roberto Greco ◽  
Manuela Persia ◽  
Patrizia Tartarino

Abstract Methods for the three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of forest trees have been suggested for data from active and passive sensors. Laser scanner technologies have become popular in the last few years, despite their high costs. Since the improvements in photogrammetric algorithms (e.g. structure from motion—SfM), photographs have become a new low-cost source of 3D point clouds. In this study, we use images captured by a smartphone camera to calculate dense point clouds of a forest plot using SfM. Eighteen point clouds were produced by changing the densification parameters (Image scale, Point density, Minimum number of matches) in order to investigate their influence on the quality of the point clouds produced. In order to estimate diameter at breast height (d.b.h.) and stem volumes, we developed an automatic method that extracts the stems from the point cloud and then models them with cylinders. The results show that Image scale is the most influential parameter in terms of identifying and extracting trees from the point clouds. The best performance with cylinder modelling from point clouds compared to field data had an RMSE of 1.9 cm and 0.094 m3, for d.b.h. and volume, respectively. Thus, for forest management and planning purposes, it is possible to use our photogrammetric and modelling methods to measure d.b.h., stem volume and possibly other forest inventory metrics, rapidly and without felling trees. The proposed methodology significantly reduces working time in the field, using ‘non-professional’ instruments and automating estimates of dendrometric parameters.


Author(s):  
Bisheng Yang ◽  
Yuan Liu ◽  
Fuxun Liang ◽  
Zhen Dong

High Accuracy Driving Maps (HADMs) are the core component of Intelligent Drive Assistant Systems (IDAS), which can effectively reduce the traffic accidents due to human error and provide more comfortable driving experiences. Vehicle-based mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems provide an efficient solution to rapidly capture three-dimensional (3D) point clouds of road environments with high flexibility and precision. This paper proposes a novel method to extract road features (e.g., road surfaces, road boundaries, road markings, buildings, guardrails, street lamps, traffic signs, roadside-trees, power lines, vehicles and so on) for HADMs in highway environment. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed algorithm attains an average precision and recall in terms of 90.6% and 91.2% in extracting road features. Results demonstrate the efficiencies and feasibilities of the proposed method for extraction of road features for HADMs.


Author(s):  
T. Guo ◽  
A. Capra ◽  
M. Troyer ◽  
A. Gruen ◽  
A. J. Brooks ◽  
...  

Recent advances in automation of photogrammetric 3D modelling software packages have stimulated interest in reconstructing highly accurate 3D object geometry in unconventional environments such as underwater utilizing simple and low-cost camera systems. The accuracy of underwater 3D modelling is affected by more parameters than in single media cases. This study is part of a larger project on 3D measurements of temporal change of coral cover in tropical waters. It compares the accuracies of 3D point clouds generated by using images acquired from a system camera mounted in an underwater housing and the popular GoPro cameras respectively. A precisely measured calibration frame was placed in the target scene in order to provide accurate control information and also quantify the errors of the modelling procedure. In addition, several objects (cinder blocks) with various shapes were arranged in the air and underwater and 3D point clouds were generated by automated image matching. These were further used to examine the relative accuracy of the point cloud generation by comparing the point clouds of the individual objects with the objects measured by the system camera in air (the best possible values). Given a working distance of about 1.5 m, the GoPro camera can achieve a relative accuracy of 1.3 mm in air and 2.0 mm in water. The system camera achieved an accuracy of 1.8 mm in water, which meets our requirements for coral measurement in this system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge L. Martínez ◽  
Mariano Morán ◽  
Jesús Morales ◽  
Alfredo Robles ◽  
Manuel Sánchez

Autonomous navigation of ground vehicles on natural environments requires looking for traversable terrain continuously. This paper develops traversability classifiers for the three-dimensional (3D) point clouds acquired by the mobile robot Andabata on non-slippery solid ground. To this end, different supervised learning techniques from the Python library Scikit-learn are employed. Training and validation are performed with synthetic 3D laser scans that were labelled point by point automatically with the robotic simulator Gazebo. Good prediction results are obtained for most of the developed classifiers, which have also been tested successfully on real 3D laser scans acquired by Andabata in motion.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 3568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Shinohara ◽  
Haoyi Xiu ◽  
Masashi Matsuoka

In the computer vision field, many 3D deep learning models that directly manage 3D point clouds (proposed after PointNet) have been published. Moreover, deep learning-based-techniques have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance for supervised learning tasks on 3D point cloud data, such as classification and segmentation tasks for open datasets in competitions. Furthermore, many researchers have attempted to apply these deep learning-based techniques to 3D point clouds observed by aerial laser scanners (ALSs). However, most of these studies were developed for 3D point clouds without radiometric information. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using a deep learning method to solve the semantic segmentation task of airborne full-waveform light detection and ranging (lidar) data that consists of geometric information and radiometric waveform data. Thus, we propose a data-driven semantic segmentation model called the full-waveform network (FWNet), which handles the waveform of full-waveform lidar data without any conversion process, such as projection onto a 2D grid or calculating handcrafted features. Our FWNet is based on a PointNet-based architecture, which can extract the local and global features of each input waveform data, along with its corresponding geographical coordinates. Subsequently, the classifier consists of 1D convolutional operational layers, which predict the class vector corresponding to the input waveform from the extracted local and global features. Our trained FWNet achieved higher scores in its recall, precision, and F1 score for unseen test data—higher scores than those of previously proposed methods in full-waveform lidar data analysis domain. Specifically, our FWNet achieved a mean recall of 0.73, a mean precision of 0.81, and a mean F1 score of 0.76. We further performed an ablation study, that is assessing the effectiveness of our proposed method, of the above-mentioned metric. Moreover, we investigated the effectiveness of our PointNet based local and global feature extraction method using the visualization of the feature vector. In this way, we have shown that our network for local and global feature extraction allows training with semantic segmentation without requiring expert knowledge on full-waveform lidar data or translation into 2D images or voxels.


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