Difference of Normals as a Multi-Scale Operator in Unorganized Point Clouds

A novel multi-scale operator for unorganized 3D point clouds is introduced. The Difference of Normals (DoN) provides a computationally efficient, multi-scale approach to processing large unorganized 3D point clouds. The application of DoN in the multi-scale filtering of two different real-world outdoor urban LIDAR scene datasets is quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrated. In both datasets the DoN operator is shown to segment large 3D point clouds into scale-salient clusters, such as cars, people, and lamp posts towards applications in semi-automatic annotation, and as a pre-processing step in automatic object recognition. The application of the operator to segmentation is evaluated on a large public dataset of outdoor LIDAR scenes with ground truth annotations.Comment: To be published in proceedings of 3DIMPVT 201

Quantitative Analysis of Saliency Models

Previous saliency detection research required the reader to evaluate performance qualitatively, based on renderings of saliency maps on a few shapes. This qualitative approach meant it was unclear which saliency models were better, or how well they compared to human perception. This paper provides a quantitative evaluation framework that addresses this issue. In the first quantitative analysis of 3D computational saliency models, we evaluate four computational saliency models and two baseline models against ground-truth saliency collected in previous work.Comment: 10 page

Segmenting salient objects in 3D point clouds of indoor scenes using geodesic distances

Visual attention mechanisms allow humans to extract relevant and important information from raw input percepts. Many applications in robotics and computer vision have modeled human visual attention mechanisms using a bottom-up data centric approach. In contrast, recent studies in cognitive science highlight advantages of a top-down approach to the attention mechanisms, especially in applications involving goal-directed search. In this paper, we propose a top-down approach for extracting salient objects/regions of space. The top-down methodology first isolates different objects in an unorganized point cloud, and compares each object for uniqueness. A measure of saliency using the properties of geodesic distance on the object’s surface is defined. Our method works on 3D point cloud data, and identifies salient objects of high curvature and unique silhouette. These being the most unique features of a scene, are robust to clutter, occlusions and view point changes. We provide the details of the proposed method and initial experimental results

Revue des descripteurs tridimensionnels (3D) pour la catégorisation des nuages de points acquis avec un système LiDAR de télémétrie mobile

La compréhension de nuage de points LiDAR consiste à reconnaitre les objets qui sont présents dans la scène et à associer des interprétations aux nuages d’objets qui le composent. Les données LiDAR acquises en milieu urbain dans des environnements à grande échelle avec des systèmes terrestres de télémétrie mobile présentent plusieurs difficultés propres à ce contexte : chevauchement entre les nuages de points, occlusions entre les objets qui ne sont vus que partiellement, variations de la densité des points. Compte tenu de ces difficultés, beaucoup de descripteurs tridimensionnels (3D) proposés dans la littérature pour la classification et la reconnaissance d’objets voient leurs performances se dégrader dans ce contexte applicatif, car ils ont souvent été introduits et évalués avec des jeux de données portant sur de petits objets. De plus, il y a un manque de comparaison approfondie entre les descripteurs 3D mis en œuvre dans des environnements à grande échelle ce qui a pour conséquence un manque de connaissance au moment de sélectionner le descripteur 3D le plus adapté à un nuage de points LiDAR acquis dans de tels environnements. Le présent article propose une revue approfondie des travaux portant sur l’application des descripteurs 3D à des données LiDAR acquises en milieu urbain dans des environnements à grande échelle avec des systèmes terrestres de télémétrie mobile. Les principaux descripteurs 3D appliqués dans de tels contextes sont ainsi recensés. Une synthèse de leurs performances et limites est ensuite effectuée de manière comparative sur la base des travaux disponibles dans la littérature. Enfin, une discussion abordant les éléments impactant le plus les performances des descripteurs et des pistes d’amélioration vient compléter cette revue.Understanding a LiDAR point cloud entails recognizing the objects present in the scene and associating interpretations to the object clouds that make it up. LiDAR data acquired in a large-scale urban setting with landbased mobile telemetry systems present several challenges specific to this context: overlapping point clouds, occlusion between objects that are seen only partially, variations in point density. Given these challenges, many of the 3D descriptors proposed in literature for classifying and recognizing objects see their performance degrade in this application context, because they were often introduced and assessed with datasets dealing with small objects. In addition, there is a lack of thorough comparison between the 3D descriptors implemented in large-scale environments, which induces a lack of knowledge when the time comes to select the 3D descriptor best adapted to a LiDAR point cloud acquired in such an environment. This article proposes an in-depth review of works on the application of 3D descriptors to LiDAR data acquired in a large-scale urban setting through land-based mobile telemetry systems. The key 3D descriptors applied in such a context are thus inventoried. A comparative synthesis of their performance and limits is then performed on the basis of the works available in literature. Finally, a discussion on the elements having the biggest impact on the descriptors’ performances and on improvement leads completes this review

Multi-scale interest regions from unorganized point clouds

Several computer vision algorithms rely on detecting a compact but representative set of interest regions and their associated descriptors from input data. When the input is in the form of an unorganized 3D point cloud, current practice is to compute shape descriptors either exhaustively or at randomly chosen locations using one or more preset neighborhood sizes. Such a strategy ignores the relative variation in the spatial extent of geometric structures and also risks introducing redundancy in the representation. This paper pursues multi-scale operators on point clouds that allow detection of interest regions whose locations as well as spatial extent are completely data-driven. The approach distinguishes itself from related work by operating directly in the input 3D space without assuming an available polygon mesh or resorting to an intermediate global 2D parameterization. Results are shown to demonstrate the utility and robustness of the proposed method. ∗ 1