Semantic segmentation of mobile laser scanning point clouds with long short-term memory networks: Preliminary results

J. Balado*, P. Van Oosterom, L. Díaz-Vilariño, P. Arias

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleScientificpeer-review

39 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Although point clouds are characterized as a type of unstructured data, timestamp attribute can structure point clouds into scanlines and shape them into a time signal. The present work studies the transformation of the street point cloud into a time signal based on the Z component for the semantic segmentation using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The experiment was conducted on the point cloud of a real case study. Several training sessions were performed changing the Level of Detail of the classification (coarse level with 3 classes and fine level with 11 classes), two levels of network depth and the use of weighting for the improvement of classes with low number of points. The results showed high accuracy, reaching at best 97.3% in the classification with 3 classes (ground, buildings, and objects) and 95.7% with 11 classes. The distribution of the success rates was not the same for all classes. The classes with the highest number of points obtained better results than the others. The application of weighting improved the classes with few points at the expense of the classes with more points. Increasing the number of hidden layers was shown as a preferable alternative to weighting. Given the high success rates and a behaviour of the LSTM consistent with other Neural Networks in point cloud processing, it is concluded that the LSTM is a feasible alternative for the semantic segmentation of point clouds transformed into time signals.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)123-130
JournalInternational Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives
Volume43
Issue numberB2-2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 24th ISPRS Congress Commission II: Imaging Today, Foreseeing Tomorrow - Virtual, Online, France
Duration: 5 Jul 20219 Jul 2021

Keywords

  • LiDAR
  • Object classification
  • Recurrent Neural Networks
  • Street point clouds
  • Urban environment

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Semantic segmentation of mobile laser scanning point clouds with long short-term memory networks: Preliminary results'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this