A hybrid method for skeleton extraction on Kinect sensor data: Combination of L1-Median and Laplacian shrinking algorithms

Skeleton-based intrinsic symmetry detection on point clouds

Skeleton extraction from 3D plant point cloud data is an essential prior for myriads of phenotyping studies. Although skeleton extraction from 3D shapes have been studied extensively in the computer vision and graphics literature, handling the case of plants is still an open problem. Drawbacks of the existing approaches include the zigzag structure of the skeleton, nonuniform density of skeleton points, lack of points in the areas having complex geometry structure, and most importantly the lack of biological relevance. With the aim to improve existing skeleton structures of state-of-the-art, we propose a stochastic framework which is supported by the biological structure of the original plant (we consider plants without any leaves). Initially we estimate the branching structure of the plant by the notion of β-splines to form a curve tree defined as a finite set of curves joined in a tree topology with certain level of smoothness. In the next phase, we force the discrete points in the curve tree to move toward the original point cloud by treating each point in the curve tree as a center of Gaussian, and points in the input cloud data as observations from the Gaussians. The task is to find the correct locations of the Gaussian centroids by maximizing a likelihood. The optimization technique is iterative and is based on the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The E-step estimates which Gaussian the observed point cloud was sampled from, and the M-step maximizes the negative log-likelihood that the observed points were sampled from the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with respect to the model parameters. We experiment with several real world and synthetic datasets and demonstrate the robustness of the approach over the state-of-the-art.

Statistical Shape Modeling (SSM) is a valuable tool for investigating and quantifying anatomical variations within populations of anatomies. However, traditional correspondence-based SSM generation methods have a prohibitive inference process and require complete geometric proxies (e.g., high-resolution binary volumes or surface meshes) as input shapes to construct the SSM. Unordered 3D point cloud representations of shapes are more easily acquired from various medical imaging practices (e.g., thresholded images and surface scanning). Point cloud deep networks have recently achieved remarkable success in learning permutation-invariant features for different point cloud tasks (e.g., completion, semantic segmentation, classification). However, their application to learning SSM from point clouds is to-date unexplored. In this work, we demonstrate that existing point cloud encoder-decoder-based completion networks can provide an untapped potential for SSM, capturing population-level statistical representations of shapes while reducing the inference burden and relaxing the input requirement. We discuss the limitations of these techniques to the SSM application and suggest future improvements. Our work paves the way for further exploration of point cloud deep learning for SSM, a promising avenue for advancing shape analysis literature and broadening SSM to diverse use cases.

We introduce a distance field guided \(L_1\)-median method to extract topologically clean 1D curve skeleton from the point cloud model. We first voxelize the input point cloud, and compute the distance field for the point cloud. Then with the distance field, we extract the initial skeleton of the model using a multi-scale parameter controlled thinning method. Finally, we incorporate the initial skeleton into the \(L_1\)-median optimization, and develop a distance field guided \(L_1\)-median to effectively extract the complete skeleton from the point cloud. Our method exhibits the advantages of both the distance field based skeleton extraction methods and the \(L_1\)-median skeleton extraction methods. Our skeleton extraction system is robust and effective, and can be applied to the raw scanned point cloud data.

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is widely used in the automotive industry as it can provide point cloud information containing precise distances. Three-dimensional (3D) object detection based on LiDAR point clouds is significant for environment perception tasks. However, feature learning for point clouds remains challenging. This paper proposes a two-stage voxel-based LiDAR 3D object detector, referred to as density-aware and neighborhood attention (DenNet), that focuses on the neighborhood information of objects. DenNet mainly integrates two modules: voxel density-aware (VDA) and neighborhood attention (NA). VDA introduces density information of the point cloud. Here, point cloud density information was added as voxel features in the voxel-based framework to alleviate the information loss during voxelization. Additionally, to extract neighbor information, the characteristics of 3D objects were analyzed for traffic scenes. The NA mechanism was adopted, which localizes the receptive field for each query to its nearest neighboring points. DenNet yielded competitive results, as compared with state-of-the-art methods, for the KITTI and One Million Scenes (ONCE) datasets; notably, it afforded an improvement of 3.96% relative to the baseline mean average precision on the more challenging ONCE dataset.

In reverse engineering, the point cloud data processing is the key, it will directly affect the quality and efficiency of the subsequent reconstruction of the surface. However, the amount of data obtained by three-dimensional laser scanning is often larger and redundant, which will increase the difficulty of the surface reconstruction, therefore, the point cloud data is needed to streamline. Depth analysis of the efficiency and accuracy of curvature grid method, a secondary streamlined algorithm is proposed, which take use of non-uniform grid streamline law based on octree to streamline to the point cloud, and re-use curvature streamline method based on B-spline surface fitting to streamline it. This method, whose streamline ratio is relatively high, can effectively retain the feature point cloud data, providing a great convenience for the follow-up of reverse engineering.

Numerical modelling of airflow in underground mines is gaining importance in modern ventilation system design and safety assessment. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations enable detailed analyses of air movement, contaminant dispersion, and heat transfer, yet their reliability depends strongly on the accuracy of the geometric representation of excavations. Raw point cloud data obtained from laser scanning of underground workings are typically irregular, noisy, and contain discontinuities that must be processed before being used for CFD meshing. This study presents a methodology for automatic segmentation and regularization of large-scale point cloud data of underground excavation systems. The proposed approach is based on skeleton extraction and trajectory analysis, which enable the separation of excavation networks into individual tunnel segments and crossings. The workflow includes outlier removal, alpha-shape generation, voxelization, medial-axis skeletonization, and topology-based segmentation using neighbor relationships within the voxel grid. A proximity-based correction step is introduced to handle doubled crossings produced by the skeletonization process. The segmented sections are subsequently regularized through radial analysis and surface reconstruction to produce uniform and watertight models suitable for mesh generation in CFD software (Ansys 2024 R1). The methodology was tested on both synthetic datasets and real-world laser scans acquired in underground mine conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed segmentation approach effectively isolates single-line drifts and crossings, ensuring continuous and smooth geometry while preserving the overall excavation topology. The developed method provides a robust preprocessing framework that bridges the gap between point cloud acquisition and numerical modelling, enabling automated transformation of raw data into CFD-ready geometric models for ventilation and safety analysis of complex underground excavation systems.

The advancement of deep learning technology has been concentrating on deploying end-to-end solutions using high dimensional data, such as images. Recently, a number of methods have been proposed for reconstructing 3D objects using deep learning. One such technique is the method that involves recovering 3D objects as voxel grids using one or multiple images. However, there has been very little work directed towards the generation of 3D objects represented by a set of points, i.e. point cloud, from voxel grids which are ambiguous and coarse. The development of a deep learning model that generates point clouds with details from coarse voxel grids has numerous benefits to quality of life. For example, design professionals can use this model to generate detailed 3D point clouds using a sketched and coarse voxel to enable their creativities. This paper presents an algorithm to generate point clouds from voxel grids. The algorithm explicitly loads 3D objects into voxels without projection operations and associated information loss. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of the voxel grid, the grid is analyzed through various angles, as inspired by how humans observe 3D objects. The features from various angles are passed into a GRU layer to extract patterns across views, which will then be passed to a channel-wise convolutional layer and graph convolution to generated the predicted point cloud. The experimental result of the algorithm indicates that the algorithm is capable of generating high-quality point clouds by understanding the semantic features of the voxel grid.

Currently, there are many kinds of voxel-based multisensor 3D object detectors, while point-based multisensor 3D object detectors have not been fully studied. In this paper, we propose a new 3D two-stage object detection method based on point cloud and image fusion to improve the detection accuracy. To address the problem of insufficient semantic information of point cloud, we perform multiscale deep fusion of LiDAR point and camera image in a point-wise manner to enhance point features. Due to the imbalance of LiDAR points, the object point cloud in the long-distance area is sparse. We design a point cloud completion module to predict the spatial shape of objects in the candidate boxes and extract the structural information to improve the feature representation ability to further refine the boxes. The framework is evaluated on widely used KITTI and SUN-RGBD dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms all state-of-the-art point-based 3D object detection methods and has comparable performance to voxel-based methods as well.

Direct immersogeometric fluid flow and heat transfer analysis of objects represented by point clouds

Nowadays, point clouds are frequently gathered by 3D scanners such as Lidar and Kinect, which produces thousands of point cloud models. Point cloud processing is vital to 3D vision, especially 3D object recognition, positioning, and navigation technology. Addressing uneven data density caused by coordinate frame transformations and the inherent problem of insufficient context connection in point clouds, the DiM-PCNet (Multi-scale and Multi-level Point Clouds Classification Network, and the Di is a prefix to represent double M in Multi-scale and Multi-level) is proposed in this paper. DiM-PCNet is provided for object classification with multi-scale and multi-level features. We encode the point cloud in multi-scale and fully fuse the features with the raw point cloud for keeping the context relationship. In DiM-PCNet, we sample the point clouds from eight parts for multi-scales feature extraction. The multi-scales features are fully fused by multi-level pyramid models. The multi-scale and multi-level strategies are applied in DiM-PCNet, in which the abundant and important features of point clouds are extracted and utilized in the 3D object classification. It is worth noting that the DiM-PCNet feature block can be embedded into the segmentation net, where the accuracy achieved is 87.1%. We conducted experiments on ShapeNet and ModelNet40 and the experimental results show that DiM-PCNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D object classification. The experiment shows competitive performance on robustness and segmentation tasks.

The 3D object detection is becoming indispensable for environmental perception in autonomous driving. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds often fail to distinguish objects with similar structures and are quite sparse for distant or small objects, thereby introducing false and missed detections. To address these issues, LiDAR is often fused with cameras due to the rich textural information provided by images. However, current fusion methods suffer the inefficient data representation and inaccurate alignment of heterogeneous features, leading to poor precision and low efficiency. To this end, we propose a plug-and-play module termed range-image fusion (RI-Fusion) to achieve an effective fusion of LiDAR and camera data, designed to be easily accessible by existing mainstream LiDAR-based algorithms. In this process, we design an image and point cloud alignment method by converting a point cloud into a compact range-view representation through a spherical coordinate transformation. The range image is then integrated with a corresponding camera image utilizing an attention mechanism. The original range image is then concatenated with fusion features to retain point cloud information, and the results are projected onto a spatial point cloud. Finally, the feature-enhanced point cloud can be input into a LiDAR-based 3D object detector. The results of validation experiments involving the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark showed that our proposed fusion method significantly enhanced multiple mainstream LiDAR-based 3D object detectors, PointPillars, SECOND, and Part <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{A}{^{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , improving the 3D mAP (mean Average Precision) by 3.61%, 2.98%, and 1.27%, respectively, particularly for small objects such as pedestrians and cyclists.

In Amazon Robotic Challenge, we need to make unknown object's 3d model for recognizing and estimating 6D pose in limited time. The paper presents a unique autonomous system to build object's complete 3d model fast. This method is different with others for it can build object's model contains object's bottom side. We modify ElasticFusion to focus on building object's 3D model from object's up-side with assistant pose information from Aruco Markers. Then instead of using ICP or other merge algorithms, we merge object's upside point cloud and bottom-side point cloud easily by using Aruco Markers on transparent board. At last, we use octree and source point cloud to color poisson reconstruction mesh model to obtain object's final complete colored 3d model. Experiment results show that our approach can generate common object's complete model with acceptable size error in limited time.

This paper presents our novel algorithm for decoration points' segmentation with simple calculation in a two-dimensional domain. Our algorithm works for unorganized point clouds. It extracts the relationship between two adjacent sub-regions, which are derived from a single cross section of the point cloud. The cutting planes are defined by the Frenet frame of curve skeleton. In our method, angle-based information from the cross sections is introduced and plays an important role. The angle-based information called function indicates angle difference of the adjacent left and right sub-regions, which are determined by a line segment calculated by a linear least square of the nearest left and right points. Using the angle function, critical points such as inflection and extrinsic points can be found. Finally, the segmentation algorithm is able to detect the decoration points using the principal points.

Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) is a versatile remote sensing technology based on Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) technology that has been utilized for a wide range of applications. Several previous reviews focused on applications or characteristics of these systems exist in the literature, however, reviews of the many innovative data processing strategies described in the literature have not been conducted in sufficient depth. To this end, we review and summarize the state of the art for MLS data processing approaches, including feature extraction, segmentation, object recognition, and classification. In this review, we first discuss the impact of the scene type to the development of an MLS data processing method. Then, where appropriate, we describe relevant generalized algorithms for feature extraction and segmentation that are applicable to and implemented in many processing approaches. The methods for object recognition and point cloud classification are further reviewed including both the general concepts as well as technical details. In addition, available benchmark datasets for object recognition and classification are summarized. Further, the current limitations and challenges that a significant portion of point cloud processing techniques face are discussed. This review concludes with our future outlook of the trends and opportunities of MLS data processing algorithms and applications.