Recognizing point clouds using conditional random fields

Detecting objects in cluttered scenes is a necessary step for many robotic tasks and facilitates the interaction of the robot with its environment. Because of the availability of efficient 3D sensing devices as the Kinect, methods for the recognition of objects in 3D point clouds have gained importance during the last years. In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning approach for the recognition of objects from 3D point clouds using Conditional Random Fields, a type of discriminative, undirected probabilistic graphical model. The various features and contextual relations of the objects are described by the potential functions in the graph. Our method allows for learning and inference from unorganized point clouds of arbitrary sizes and shows significant benefit in terms of computational speed during prediction when compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on constrained optimization.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Semantic Labeling of Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds via Active Learning and Higher Order MRF

【Abstract】Using mobile Light Detection and Ranging point clouds to accomplish road scene labeling tasks shows promise for a variety of applications. Most existing methods for semantic labeling of point clouds require a huge number of fully supervised point cloud scenes, where each point needs to be manually annotated with a specific category. Manually annotating each point in point cloud scenes is labor intensive and hinders practical usage of those methods. To alleviate such a huge burden of manual annotation, in this paper, we introduce an active learning method that avoids annotating the whole point cloud scenes by iteratively annotating a small portion of unlabeled supervoxels and creating a minimal manually annotated training set. In order to avoid the biased sampling existing in traditional active learning methods, a neighbor-consistency prior is exploited to select the potentially misclassified samples into the training set to improve the accuracy of the statistical model. Furthermore, lots of methods only consider short-range contextual information to conduct semantic labeling tasks, but ignore the long-range contexts among local variables. In this paper, we use a higher order Markov random field model to take into account more contexts for refining the labeling results, despite of lacking fully supervised scenes. Evaluations on three data sets show that our proposed framework achieves a high accuracy in labeling point clouds although only a small portion of labels is provided. Moreover, comparative experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework is superior to traditional sampling methods and exhibits comparable performance to those fully supervised models.10.13039/501100001809-National Natural Science Foundation of China; Collaborative Innovation Center of Haixi Government Affairs Big Data Sharin

Recognizing point clouds using conditional random fields

Trabajo presentado a la 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR-2014), celebrada en Estocolmo (Suecia) del 24 al 28 de agosto.Detecting objects in cluttered scenes is a necessary step for many robotic tasks and facilitates the interaction of the robot with its environment. Because of the availability of efficient 3D sensing devices as the Kinect, methods for the recognition of objects in 3D point clouds have gained importance during the last years. In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning approach for the recognition of objects from 3D point clouds using Conditional Random Fields, a type of discriminative, undirected probabilistic graphical model. The various features and contextual relations of the objects are described by the potential functions in the graph. Our method allows for learning and inference from unorganized point clouds of arbitrary sizes and shows significant benefit in terms of computational speed during prediction when compared to a state-of-the-art approach based on constrained optimization.This work was supported by the EU project (IntellAct FP7-269959), the project PAU+ (DPI2011-27510), and the CSIC project CINNOVA (201150E088). B. Dellen was supported by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation via a Ramon y Cajal fellowship.Peer Reviewe

SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds

3D semantic scene labeling is fundamental to agents operating in the real world. In particular, labeling raw 3D point sets from sensors provides fine-grained semantics. Recent works leverage the capabilities of Neural Networks (NNs), but are limited to coarse voxel predictions and do not explicitly enforce global consistency. We present SEGCloud, an end-to-end framework to obtain 3D point-level segmentation that combines the advantages of NNs, trilinear interpolation(TI) and fully connected Conditional Random Fields (FC-CRF). Coarse voxel predictions from a 3D Fully Convolutional NN are transferred back to the raw 3D points via trilinear interpolation. Then the FC-CRF enforces global consistency and provides fine-grained semantics on the points. We implement the latter as a differentiable Recurrent NN to allow joint optimization. We evaluate the framework on two indoor and two outdoor 3D datasets (NYU V2, S3DIS, KITTI, Semantic3D.net), and show performance comparable or superior to the state-of-the-art on all datasets.Comment: Accepted as a spotlight at the International Conference of 3D Vision (3DV 2017

Segmentation and Classification of 3D Urban Point Clouds: Comparison and Combination of Two Approaches

International audienceSegmentation and classification of 3D urban point clouds is a complex task, making it very difficult for any single method to overcome all the diverse challenges offered. This sometimes requires the combination of several techniques to obtain the desired results for different applications. This work presents and compares two different approaches for segmenting and classifying 3D urban point clouds. In the first approach, detection, segmentation and classification of urban objects from 3D point clouds, converted into elevation images, are performed by using mathematical morphology. First, the ground is segmented and objects are detected as discontinuities on the ground. Then, connected objects are segmented using a watershed approach. Finally, objects are classified using SVM (Support Vector Machine) with geometrical and contextual features. The second method employs a super-voxel based approach in which the 3D urban point cloud is first segmented into voxels and then converted into super-voxels. These are then clustered together using an efficient link-chain method to form objects. These segmented objects are then classified using local descriptors and geometrical features into basic object classes. Evaluated on a common dataset (real data), both these methods are thoroughly compared on three different levels: detection, segmentation and classification. After analyses, simple strategies are also presented to combine the two methods, exploiting their complementary strengths and weaknesses, to improve the overall segmentation and classification results

Line Based Multi-Range Asymmetric Conditional Random Field For Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data Classification

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is a ground-based, active imaging method that rapidly acquires accurate, highly dense three-dimensional point cloud of object surfaces by laser range finding. For fully utilizing its benefits, developing a robust method to classify many objects of interests from huge amounts of laser point clouds is urgently required. However, classifying massive TLS data faces many challenges, such as complex urban scene, partial data acquisition from occlusion. To make an automatic, accurate and robust TLS data classification, we present a line-based multi-range asymmetric Conditional Random Field algorithm. The first contribution is to propose a line-base TLS data classification method. In this thesis, we are interested in seven classes: building, roof, pedestrian road (PR), tree, low man-made object (LMO), vehicle road (VR), and low vegetation (LV). The line-based classification is implemented in each scan profile, which follows the line profiling nature of laser scanning mechanism.Ten conventional local classifiers are tested, including popular generative and discriminative classifiers, and experimental results validate that the line-based method can achieve satisfying classification performance. However, local classifiers implement labeling task on individual line independently of its neighborhood, the inference of which often suffers from similar local appearance across different object classes. The second contribution is to propose a multi-range asymmetric Conditional Random Field (maCRF) model, which uses object context as post-classification to improve the performance of a local generative classifier. The maCRF incorporates appearance, local smoothness constraint, and global scene layout regularity together into a probabilistic graphical model. The local smoothness enforces that lines in a local area to have the same class label, while scene layout favours an asymmetric regularity of spatial arrangement between different object classes within long-range, which is considered both in vertical (above-bellow relation) and horizontal (front-behind) directions. The asymmetric regularity allows capturing directional spatial arrangement between pairwise objects (e.g. it allows ground is lower than building, not vice-versa). The third contribution is to extend the maCRF model by adding across scan profile context, which is called Across scan profile Multi-range Asymmetric Conditional Random Field (amaCRF) model. Due to the sweeping nature of laser scanning, the sequentially acquired TLS data has strong spatial dependency, and the across scan profile context can provide more contextual information. The final contribution is to propose a sequential classification strategy. Along the sweeping direction of laser scanning, amaCRF models were sequentially constructed. By dynamically updating posterior probability of common scan profiles, contextual information propagates through adjacent scan profiles

Detection, segmentation and classification of 3D urban objects using mathematical morphology and supervised learning

International audienceWe propose an automatic and robust approach to detect, segment and classify urban objects from 3D point clouds. Processing is carried out using elevation images and the result is reprojected onto the 3D point cloud. First, the ground is segmented and objects are detected as discontinuities on the ground. Then, connected objects are segmented using a watershed approach. Finally, objects are classified using SVM with geometrical and contextual features. Our methodology is evaluated on databases from Ohio (USA) and Paris (France). In the former, our method detects 98% of the objects, 78% of them are correctly segmented and 82% of the well-segmented objects are correctly classified. In the latter, our method leads to an improvement of about 15% on the classification step with respect to previous works. Quantitative results prove that our method not only provides a good performance but is also faster than other works reported in the literature