Individual tree extraction from urban mobile laser scanning point clouds using deep pointwise direction embedding

As one of the most important components of urban space, an outdated inventory of road-side trees may misguide managers in the assessment and upgrade of urban environments, potentially affecting urban road quality. Therefore, automatic and accurate instance segmentation of road-side trees from urban point clouds is an important task in urban ecology research. However, previous works show under- or over-segmentation effects for road-side trees due to overlapping, irregular shapes and incompleteness. In this paper, a deep learning framework that combines semantic and instance segmentation is proposed to extract single road-side trees from vehicle-mounted mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. In the semantic segmentation stage, the ground points are filtered to reduce the processing time. Subsequently, a graph-based semantic segmentation network is developed to segment road-side tree points from the raw MLS point clouds. For the individual tree segmentation stage, a novel joint instance and semantic segmentation network is adopted to detect instance-level roadside trees. Two complex Chinese urban point cloud scenes are used to evaluate the individual urban tree segmentation performance of the proposed method. The proposed method accurately extract approximately 90% of the road-side trees and achieve better segmentation results than existing published methods in both two urban MLS point clouds. Living Vegetation Volume (LVV) calculation can benefit from individual tree segmentation. The proposed method provides a promising solution for ecological construction based on the LVV calculation of urban roads.

A branch-trunk-constrained hierarchical clustering method for street trees individual extraction from mobile laser scanning point clouds

A deep learning framework for road marking extraction, classification and completion from mobile laser scanning point clouds

Semantic segmentation in the context of 3D point clouds for the railway environment holds a significant economic value, but its development is severely hindered by the lack of suitable and specific datasets. Additionally, the models trained on existing urban road point cloud datasets demonstrate poor generalisation on railway data due to a large domain gap caused by non‐overlapping special/rare categories, for example, rail track, track bed etc. To harness the potential of supervised learning methods in the domain of 3D railway semantic segmentation, we introduce RailPC, a new point cloud benchmark. RailPC provides a large‐scale dataset with rich annotations for semantic segmentation in the railway environment. Notably, RailPC contains twice the number of annotated points compared to the largest available mobile laser scanning (MLS) point cloud dataset and is the first railway‐specific 3D dataset for semantic segmentation. It covers a total of nearly 25 km railway in two different scenes (urban and mountain), with 3 billion points that are finely labelled as 16 most typical classes with respect to railway, and the data acquisition process is completed in China by MLS systems. Through extensive experimentation, we evaluate the performance of advanced scene understanding methods on the annotated dataset and present a synthetic analysis of semantic segmentation results. Based on our findings, we establish some critical challenges towards railway‐scale point cloud semantic segmentation. The dataset is available at https://github.com/NNU‐GISA/GISA‐RailPC, and we will continuously update it based on community feedback.

A shape-based segmentation method for mobile laser scanning point clouds

The enrichment of the point clouds with colour images improves the visualisation of the data as well as the segmentation and recognition processes. Coloured point clouds are becoming increasingly common, however, the colour they display is not always as expected. Errors in the colouring of point clouds acquired with Mobile Laser Scanning are due to perspective in the camera image, different resolution or poor calibration between the LiDAR sensor and the image sensor. The consequences of these errors are noticeable in elements captured in images, but not in point clouds, such as the sky. This paper focuses on the correction of the sky-coloured points, without resorting to the images that were initially used to colour the whole point cloud. The proposed method consists of three stages. First the region of interest where the erroneously coloured points are accumulated, is selected. Second, the sky-coloured points are detected by calculating the colour distance in the Lab colour space to a sample of the sky-colour. And third, the colour of the sky-coloured detected points is restored from the colour of the nearby points. The method is tested in ten real case studies with their corresponding point clouds from urban and rural areas. In two case studies, sky-coloured points were assigned manually and the remaining eight case studies, the sky-coloured points are derived from the acquisition errors. The algorithm for sky-coloured points detection obtained an average F1-score of 94.7%. The results show a correct reassignment of colour, texture, and patterns, while improving the point cloud visualisation.

Vehicle‐borne laser scanning (VLS) point cloud semantic segmentation is one of the fundamental issues in motorway target extraction. In this study, a uniform sampling‐based neural network (NN) is constructed based on the popular RandLA‐Net. The uniform sampling can ensure high efficiency and stable spatial coverage. In the proposed NN, a local extra feature encoding structure is designed, and it is combined with local geometric spatial encoding and attention mechanisms to enhance the distinctiveness of depth features and improve the geometric detail preservation ability of the network. The VLS point cloud dataset of motorway scenes collected in this study is labelled for network training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed network over the state‐of‐the‐art networks, attaining the highest intersection‐over‐union (IoU) on the majority of categories and a 4.39% improvement in mean IoU on all categories. For the pole‐shaped targets, the improvement in IoU is 9.08% relative to those of the compared methods. The labelled VLS point cloud dataset generated in this work will be made publicly available.

With the rapid development of mobile laser scanning (MLS) technology, high-precision three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data has shown great potential in different fields such as topographic mapping, road asset management and smart city construction. 3D point cloud data contains not only position information, but also the shape and attributes of the target, which is very convenient for obtaining road information. Accurate extraction of the road boundary is a basic task for obtaining road infrastructural data, which can support the generation of high-precision maps, vehicle navigation and autonomous driving. However, road boundary extraction in urban environments is easily occluded such as vehicles and pedestrians on the road, which leads to problems such as difficulty and incomplete extraction of MLS point cloud road boundaries. To address this problem, this study proposes a road boundary extraction method that integrates pavement edge information, accurately considers the position of the road boundary from two dimensions, eliminates false boundaries, and completes the missing boundary through the extracted boundary spatial relationship. First, grid elevation filtering is used to remove high-level non-ground points. Then the pavement edges and curb stone points are extracted from the preprocessed point cloud, and they are superimposed to remove false boundary points to obtain accurate road boundaries. Finally, based on the spatial relationship of road boundaries, missing parts are detected and repaired to obtain complete road boundaries. Experimental results show that the accuracy on real road scenes exceeds 98%, the completeness rate is above 91%, and the extraction quality is above 90%, which verifies the effectiveness and accuracy of this method.

Mobile laser scanning (MLS) has emerged as a pivotal tool for accurately collecting tunnel point cloud data and enabling the detection of tunnel deformation. This study introduces a novel approach for the precise monitoring of tunnel cross-section deformation, a critical factor in assessing stability and lining safety. The MLS system used in this study is the Self-mobile Intelligent Laser Scanning System (SILSS) for data acquisition. A comparison with corresponding data acquired by Leica P16 demonstrates that the data collected by SILSS are accurate. The methodology developed utilizes ellipticity parameters and deformation analysis indices based on the ellipse-fitting analysis of circular shield tunnel deformation. A key innovation is the robust denoising of data using the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) method, ensuring accurate ellipse fitting and extraction of tunnel lining. Subsequently, an algorithm segmented the tunnel cross-section lining into individual shield tunnels, enabling the calculation of ellipticity parameters for shield tunnels, which are the objects for deformation analysis. The experimental results underscore the novelty and effectiveness of this approach in monitoring deformation across different indices. The method proves to be a reliable tool for assessing tunnel health, providing a detailed evaluation of the cross-section’s condition through statistical and graphical visualization. This study significantly advances shield tunnel monitoring, offering a practical and precise methodology for tunnel deformation analysis based on MLS point cloud data.

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.

The positioning accuracy with good GNSS observation can easily reach centimetre level, supported by advanced GNSS technologies. However, it is still a challenge to offer a robust GNSS based positioning solution in a GNSS degraded area. The concept of GNSS shadow matching has been proposed to enhance the GNSS based position accuracy in city canyons, where the nearby high buildings block parts of the GNSS radio frequency (RF) signals. However, the results rely on the accuracy of the utilized ready-made 3D city model. In this paper, we investigate a solution to generate a GNSS shadow mask with mobile laser scanning (MLS) cloud data. The solution includes removal of noise points, determining the object which only attenuated the RF signal and extraction of the highest obstruction point, and eventually angle calculation for the GNSS shadow mask generation. By analysing the data with the proposed methodology, it is concluded that the MLS point cloud data can be used to extract the GNSS shadow mask after several steps of processing to filter out the hanging objects and the plantings without generating the accurate 3D model, which depicts the boundary of GNSS signal coverage more precisely in city canyon environments compared to traditional 3D models.

It is important to extract road automatically in photogrammetry. But it is difficult to extract from images. Here we use mobile laser scanning point clouds to extract road information. We use pos information to segment the point clouds around road. Boundary and road are classified by random forest classifier. Then intensity histogram was used to detect the road markings, threshold was calculated in the histogram by gaussian decomposition.

This paper proposed an organization method of laser point cloud data for the efficient management and rapid visualization of the massive point cloud data of vehicle-mounted laser scanner. In this paper, both the original point cloud data and its trajectory are sectioned for the fast indexing firstly, then the LOD(levels of details) index of each section is build based on octree structure. With a tile type and multiresolution storage mode based on folder system, the depth of octree structure is represented by the level of folder directory, and in every node folder, the corresponding point cloud data file and its node properties file are both include. The storage method of this paper decreases the preprocessing time greatly and can support concurrent access owing to mutually independence of each node. Moreover, with the application of view frustum culling technology and multi-thread dynamic dispatch technology, the rendering and roaming of massive point cloud can realize real time updating according to viewpoint change, which significantly improves the dispatch efficiency of vehicle-mounted laser point cloud data. In the experiment, our method was compared with several popular software of point cloud data processing (e.g. XGRT, Quick Terrain Reader) on the data dispatch. The results show our method has obvious advantage on storage capacity, data access time, memory footprint, rendering frame rate and so on, it indicates our method is effective for the management of vehicle-mounted laser point cloud data and can improve the production efficiency for indoor-work of vehicle-mounted laser point cloud data processing.

Power lines classification is important for electric power management and geographical objects extraction using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) point cloud data. Many supervised classification approaches have been introduced for the extraction of features such as ground, trees, and buildings, and several studies have been conducted to evaluate the framework and performance of such supervised classification methods in power lines applications. However, these studies did not systematically investigate all of the relevant factors affecting the classification results, including the segmentation scale, feature selection, classifier variety, and scene complexity. In this study, we examined these factors systematically using airborne laser scanning and mobile laser scanning point cloud data. Our results indicated that random forest and neural network were highly suitable for power lines classification in forest, suburban, and urban areas in terms of the precision, recall, and quality rates of the classification results. In contrast to some previous studies, random forest yielded the best results, while Naïve Bayes was the worst classifier in most cases. Random forest was the more robust classifier with or without feature selection for various LiDAR point cloud data. Furthermore, the classification accuracies were directly related to the selection of the local neighborhood, classifier, and feature set. Finally, it was suggested that random forest should be considered in most cases for power line classification.

Abstract. Semantic instance segmentation from scenes, serving as a crucial role for 3D modelling and scene understanding. Conducting semantic segmentation before grouping instances is adopted by the existing state-of-the-art methods. However, without additional refinement, semantic errors will fully propagate into the grouping stage, resulting in low overlap with the ground truth instance. Furthermore, the proposed methods focused on indoor level scenes, which are limited when directly applied to large-scale outdoor Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds. Numerous instances, significant object density and scale variations make ALS point clouds distinct from indoor data. In order to address the problems, we proposed a geometric characterization-aware semantic instance segmentation network, which utilized both semantic and objectness score to select potential points for grouping. And in point cloud feature learning stage, hand-craft geometry features are taken as input for geometric characterization awareness. Moreover, to address errors propagated from previous modules after grouping, we have additionally designed a per-instance refinement module. To assess semantic instance segmentation, we conducted experiments on an open-source dataset. Additionally, we performed semantic segmentation experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed point cloud feature learning method.