Segmentation-based multi-scale edge extraction to measure the persistence of features in unorganized point clouds

Edge extraction has attracted a lot of attention in computer vision. The accuracy of extracting edges in point clouds can be a significant asset for a variety of engineering scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a segmentation-based multi-scale edge extraction technique. In this approach, different regions of a point cloud are segmented by a global analysis according to the geodesic distance. Afterwards, a multi-scale operator is defined according to local neighborhoods. Thereupon, by applying this operator at multiple scales of the point cloud, the persistence of features is determined. We illustrate the proposed method by computing a feature weight that measures the likelihood of a point to be an edge, then detects the edge points based on that value at both global and local scales. Moreover, we evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively our method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves a superior accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our approach in noisier real-world datasets.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Scale-space Feature Extraction on Digital Surfaces

International audienceA classical problem in many computer graphics applications consists in extracting significant zones or points on an object surface,like loci of tangent discontinuity (edges), maxima or minima of curvatures, inflection points, etc. These places have specific localgeometrical properties and often called generically features. An important problem is related to the scale, or range of scales,for which a feature is relevant. We propose a new robust method to detect features on digital data (surface of objects in Z^3 ),which exploits asymptotic properties of recent digital curvature estimators. In [1, 2], authors have proposed curvature estimators(mean, principal and Gaussian) on 2D and 3D digitized shapes and have demonstrated their multigrid convergence (for C^3 -smoothsurfaces). Since such approaches integrate local information within a ball around points of interest, the radius is a crucial parameter.In this article, we consider the radius as a scale-space parameter. By analyzing the behavior of such curvature estimators as the ballradius tends to zero, we propose a tool to efficiently characterize and extract several relevant features (edges, smooth and flat parts)on digital surfaces

Point-cloud based 3D object detection and classification methods for self-driving applications: A survey and taxonomy

Autonomous vehicles are becoming central for the future of mobility, supported by advances in deep learning techniques. The performance of aself-driving system is highly dependent on the quality of the perception task. Developments in sensor technologies have led to an increased availability of 3D scanners such as LiDAR, allowing for a more accurate representation of the vehicle's surroundings, leading to safer systems. The rapid development and consequent rise of research studies around self-driving systems since early 2010, resulted in a tremendous increase in the number and novelty of object detection methods. After the first wave of works that essentially tried to expand known techniques from object detection in images, more recently there has been a notable development in newer and more adapted to LiDAR data works. This paper addresses the existing literature on object detection using LiDAR data within the scope of self-driving and brings a systematic way for analysing it. Unlike general object detection surveys, we will focus on point-cloud data, which presents specific challenges, notably its high-dimensional and sparse nature. This work introduces a common object detection pipeline and taxonomy to facilitate a thorough comparison between different techniques and, departing from it, this work will critically examine the representation of data (critical for complexity reduction), feature extraction and finally the object detection models. A comparison between performance results of the different models is included, alongside with some future research challenges.This work is supported by European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) [Project n. 037902; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-037902]

Piecewise smooth reconstruction of normal vector field on digital data

International audienceWe propose a novel method to regularize a normal vector field defined on a digital surface (boundary of a set of voxels). When the digital surface is a digitization of a piecewise smooth manifold, our method localizes sharp features (edges) while regularizing the input normal vector field at the same time. It relies on the optimisation of a variant of the Ambrosio-Tortorelli functional, originally defined for denoising and contour extraction in image processing [AT90]. We reformulate this functional to digital surface processing thanks to discrete calculus operators. Experiments show that the output normal field is very robust to digitization artifacts or noise, and also fairly independent of the sampling resolution. The method allows the user to choose independently the amount of smoothing and the length of the set of discontinuities. Sharp and vanishing features are correctly delineated even on extremely damaged data. Finally, our method can be used to enhance considerably the output of state-of- the-art normal field estimators like Voronoi Covariance Measure [MOG11] or Randomized Hough Transform [BM12]