Open Source First Person View 3D Point Cloud Visualizer for Large Data Sets

Topological Data Analysis is a machine learning method that summarizes the topological features of a space. Persistent Homology (PH) can identify these topological features as they persist within a point cloud; persisting in respect to the connectedness of the point cloud at increasing distances. The utility of PH is apparent in several fields including bioinformatics, network security, and object classification. However, the memory complexity of PH limits the application to relatively small point clouds for low-dimensional topological feature identification. For this reason, numerous approaches to optimize and approximate the PH have been introduced for providing results over large point clouds. One solution, Partitioned Persistent Homology (PPH), has shown favorable approximation on a single node with significant performance improvement. However, the single-node approach is limited by the available system memory, leading to the need for a distributed approach for additional (especially memory) resources. This paper studies a distributed version of PPH for use with large point clouds over a high-performance compute cluster. Experimental results of the distributed algorithm against previous studies is presented along with scalability of the distributed library.

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.

Extracting roads from dense point clouds in large scale urban environment

We present TransLPC, a novel detection model for large point clouds that is based on a transformer architecture. While object detection with transformers has been an active field of research, it has proved difficult to apply such models to point clouds that span a large area, e.g. those that are common in autonomous driving, with lidar or radar data. TransLPC is able to remedy these issues: The structure of the transformer model is modified to allow for larger input sequence lengths, which are sufficient for large point clouds. Besides this, we propose a novel query refinement technique to improve detection accuracy, while retaining a memory-friendly number of transformer decoder queries. The queries are repositioned between layers, moving them closer to the bounding box they are estimating, in an efficient manner. This simple technique has a significant effect on detection accuracy, which is evaluated on the challenging nuScenes dataset on real-world lidar data. Besides this, the proposed method is compatible with existing transformer-based solutions that require object detection, e.g. for joint multi-object tracking and detection, and enables them to be used in conjunction with large point clouds.

In recent years, due to the significant advancements in hardware sensors and software technologies, 3D environmental point cloud modeling has gradually been applied in the automation industry, autonomous vehicles, and construction engineering. With the high-precision measurements of 3D LiDAR, its point clouds can clearly reflect the geometric structure and features of the environment, thus enabling the creation of high-density 3D environmental point cloud models. However, due to the enormous quantity of high-density 3D point clouds, storing and processing these 3D data requires a considerable amount of memory and computing time. In light of this, this paper proposes a real-time 3D point cloud environmental contour modeling technique. The study uses the point cloud distribution from the 3D LiDAR body frame point cloud to establish structured edge features, thereby creating a 3D environmental contour point cloud map. Additionally, unstable objects such as vehicles will appear during the mapping process; these specific objects will be regarded as not part of the stable environmental model in this study. To address this issue, the study will further remove these objects from the 3D point cloud through image recognition and LiDAR heterogeneous matching, resulting in a higher quality 3D environmental contour point cloud map. This 3D environmental contour point cloud not only retains the recognizability of the environmental structure but also solves the problems of massive data storage and processing. Moreover, the method proposed in this study can achieve real-time realization without requiring the 3D point cloud to be organized in a structured order, making it applicable to unorganized 3D point cloud LiDAR sensors. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method in practical applications is also verified through actual experimental data.

We propose a novel deep architecture for semantic labeling of 3D point clouds referred to as Global and Local Streams Network (GLSNet) which is designed to capture both global and local structures and contextual information for large scale 3D point cloud classification. Our GLSNet tackles a hard problem - large differences of object sizes in large-scale point cloud segmentation including extremely large objects like water, and small objects like buildings and trees, and we design a two-branch deep network architecture to decompose the complex problem to separate processing problems at global and local scales and then fuse their predictions. GLSNet combines the strength of Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Network [1] for learning global structure with the strength of PointNet++ [2] for incorporating local information. The first branch of GLSNet processes a full point cloud in the global stream, and it captures long range information about the geometric structure by using a U-Net structured Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Network (SSCN-U) architecture. The second branch of GLSNet processes a point cloud in the local stream, and it partitions 3D points into slices and processes one slice of the cloud at a time by using the PointNet ++ architecture. The two streams of information are fused by max pooling over their classification prediction vectors. Our results on the IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest Urban Semantic 3D, Track 4 (DFT4) [3] [4] [5] point cloud classification dataset have shown that GLSNet achieved performance gains of almost 4% in mIOU and 1% in overall accuracy over the individual streams on the held-back testing dataset.

This paper presents a system that can automatically segment objects in large scale 3D point clouds obtained from urban ranging images. The system consists of three steps: The first one involves a ground detection process that can detect relatively complex terrain and separate it from other objects. The second step superpixelizes the remaining objects to speed up the segmentation process. In the final step, a manifold embedded mode seeking method is adopted to segment the point clouds. Even though the segmentation of urban objects is a challenging problem in terms of accuracy and problem scale, our system can efficiently generate very good segmentation results. The proposed manifold learning effectively improves the segmentation performance due to the fact that continuous artificial objects often have manifold-like structures.

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.

This paper introduces a new urban point cloud dataset for automatic segmentation and classification acquired by mobile laser scanning (MLS). We describe how the dataset is obtained from acquisition to post-processing and labeling. This dataset can be used to train pointwise classification algorithms; however, given that a great attention has been paid to the split between the different objects, this dataset can also be used to train the detection and segmentation of objects. The dataset consists of around 2 k m of MLS point cloud acquired in two cities. The number of points and range of classes mean that it can be used to train deep-learning methods. In addition, we show some results of automatic segmentation and classification. The dataset is available at: http://caor-mines-paristech.fr/fr/paris-lille-3d-dataset/.

In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to the efficient representation, modeling, processing and rendering of point-based models (point clouds). Due to their conceptual simplicity and superior flexibility, point-based representations evolved into a valuable alternative to polygonal meshes. This paper explores the problem of extracting direct visibility from point clouds without explicitly reconstructing the surface or estimating normal. The main contribution of this work is a hardware-accelerated hidden point removal operator. This operator is based on the GPU splatting technique combined with a morphological operation over the depth buffer to reduce the silhouette effect in the final image. The motivation to develop a new operator is the low efficiency demonstrated by existing hidden point removal methods in real time applications with large point clouds. We demonstrate that our proposal is useful for visualizing point clouds with interactive frame rates.

Abstract. Recently, with the progress of laser scanning technology, it has become possible to scan several environments such as buildings, roads, and cities easily and at a low cost. There are typically three scanning methods: TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanning), MMS (Mobile Mapping System), and ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning), and the environments are scanned for measurement, modelling, and simulation etc. Therefore, an efficient and comprehensive data management method, which can handle these point clouds in various applications is strongly required. In this paper, we describe a method of data management for efficient search and rendering of multiple large scale point clouds. First, we define a general point cloud file format including the octree and the quantization structure. Next, the data management method enabling an efficient search and rendering of the point clouds is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of our method is verified using several actual data sets.

Estimation of plant parameters is prerequisite for fast and precise management of tomato crops on commercial farm level. Destructive estimation methods may be accurate but not suitable when large farm size, spatio-temporal variability or short period of time to obtain information are considered. Therefore, this study was aimed to estimate leaf area (LA) in mature tomato plants from reconstructed geometric plant model based on 3-dimensional (3D) point cloud. A 2D laser scanner was placed on a programable linear conveyor system to move at controlled forward speed. To achieve a high density 3D point cloud of whole plant, close range (< 2 m) scanning was performed at 10 mm/s forward speed. Plant parameters capturing points per plant (PPP), plant height, plant volume, and LA were extracted from the 3D point clouds. Destructive method was utilized in laboratory for reference LA data collection, whereas other required reference data (plant height and canopy area) were measured in-situ. Linear regression models were developed and cross validated to estimate LA using variables from the 3D point clouds and reference LA. Among the models, plant height showed strong correlation with reference LA (R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.90, RMSE = 40 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) and followed by PPP (R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.89, RMSE = 45 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ), voxel grid approach (R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.56, RMSE = 58 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) and slicing approach (R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.44, RMSE = 70 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ). Results indicate that mobile laser scanning could be a reliable non-destructive LA estimation tool for tomato and may be adapted by the commercial tomato growers for profitable management decisions.

Abstract. The automatic analysis of large 3D point clouds represents a crucial task in photogrammetry, remote sensing and computer vision. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for the semantic interpretation of such point clouds which involves feature relevance assessment in order to reduce both processing time and memory consumption. Given a standard benchmark dataset with 1.3 million 3D points, we first extract a set of 21 geometric 3D and 2D features. Subsequently, we apply a classifier-independent ranking procedure which involves a general relevance metric in order to derive compact and robust subsets of versatile features which are generally applicable for a large variety of subsequent tasks. This metric is based on 7 different feature selection strategies and thus addresses different intrinsic properties of the given data. For the example of semantically interpreting 3D point cloud data, we demonstrate the great potential of smaller subsets consisting of only the most relevant features with 4 different state-of-the-art classifiers. The results reveal that, instead of including as many features as possible in order to compensate for lack of knowledge, a crucial task such as scene interpretation can be carried out with only few versatile features and even improved accuracy.

MVPCC-Net: Multi-View Based Point Cloud Completion Network for MLS data

Inspired by recent improvements in point cloud processing for autonomous navigation, we focus on using hierarchical graph neural networks for processing and feature learning over large-scale outdoor LiDAR point clouds. We observe that existing GNN based methods fail to overcome challenges of scale and irregularity of points in outdoor datasets. Addressing the need to preserve structural details while learning over a larger volume efficiently, we propose Hierarchical Point Graph Neural Network (HPGNN). It learns node features at various levels of graph coarseness to extract information. This enables to learn over a large point cloud while retaining fine details that existing point-level graph networks struggle to achieve. Connections between multiple levels enable a point to learn features in multiple scales, in a few iterations. We design HPGNN as a purely GNN-based approach, so that it offers modular expandability as seen with other point-based and Graph network baselines. To illustrate the improved processing capability, we compare previous point based and GNN models for semantic segmentation with our HPGNN, achieving a significant improvement for GNNs (+36.7 mIoU) on the SemanticKITTI dataset.