A LiDAR Point Clouds Dataset of Ships in a Maritime Environment

For the first time, this article introduces a LiDAR Point Clouds Dataset of Ships composed of both collected and simulated data to address the scarcity of LiDAR data in maritime applications. The collected data are acquired using specialized maritime LiDAR sensors in both inland waterways and wide-open ocean environments. The simulated data is generated by placing a ship in the LiDAR coordinate system and scanning it with a redeveloped Blensor that emulates the operation of a LiDAR sensor equipped with various laser beams. Furthermore,we also render point clouds for foggy and rainy weather conditions. To describe a realistic shipping environment, a dynamic tail wave is modeled by iterating the wave elevation of each point in a time series. Finally, networks serving small objects are migrated to ship applications by feeding our dataset. The positive effect of simulated data is described in object detection experiments, and the negative impact of tail waves as noise is verified in single-object tracking experiments. The Dataset is available at https://github.com/zqy411470859/ship_dataset.

Building Facade Point Clouds Segmentation Based on Optimal Dual-Scale Feature Descriptors

To address the current issues of inaccurate segmentation and the limited applicability of segmentation methods for building facades in point clouds, we propose a facade segmentation algorithm based on optimal dual-scale feature descriptors. First, we select the optimal dual-scale descriptors from a range of feature descriptors. Next, we segment the facade according to the threshold value of the chosen optimal dual-scale descriptors. Finally, we use RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) to fit the segmented surface and optimize the fitting result. Experimental results show that, compared to commonly used facade segmentation algorithms, the proposed method yields more accurate segmentation results, providing a robust data foundation for subsequent 3D model reconstruction of buildings.

Automatic Extraction of the Sparse Prior Correspondences for Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration

Non-rigid registration of point clouds is still far from stable,especially for the largely deformed one.Sparse initial correspondences are often adopted to facilitate the process.However,there are few studies on how to build them automatically.Therefore,in this paper,we propose a robust method to compute such priors automatically,where a global and local combined strategy is adopted.These priors in different degrees of deformation are obtained by the locally geometrical-consistent point matches from the globally structural-consistent region correspondences.To further utilize the matches,this paper also proposes a novel registration method based on the Coherent Point Drift framework.This method takes both the spatial proximity and local structural consistency of the priors as supervision of the registration process and thus obtains a robust alignment for clouds with significantly different deformations.Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

Spatio-Temporal Context-Guided Algorithm for Lossless Point Cloud Geometry Compression

Point cloud compression is critical to deploy 3D representation of the physical world such as 3D immersive telepresence,autonomous driving,and cultural heritage preservation.However,point cloud data are distributed irregularly and discontinuously in spatial and temporal domains,where redundant unoccupied voxels and weak correlations in 3D space make achieving efficient compression a challenging problem.In this paper,we propose a spatio-temporal context-guided algorithm for lossless point cloud geometry compression.The proposed scheme starts with dividing the point cloud into sliced layers of unit thickness along the longest axis.Then,it introduces a prediction method where both intraframe and inter-frame point clouds are available,by determining correspondences between adjacent layers and estimating the shortest path using the travelling salesman algorithm.Finally,the few prediction residual is efficiently compressed with optimal context-guided and adaptive fastmode arithmetic coding techniques.Experiments prove that the proposed method can effectively achieve low bit rate lossless compression of point cloud geometric information,and is suitable for 3D point cloud compression applicable to various types of scenes.

A modified method of discontinuity trace mapping using three-dimensional point clouds of rock mass surfaces

This paper presents an automated method for discontinuity trace mapping using three-dimensional point clouds of rock mass surfaces.Specifically,the method consists of five steps:(1)detection of trace feature points by normal tensor voting theory,(2)co ntraction of trace feature points,(3)connection of trace feature points,(4)linearization of trace segments,and(5)connection of trace segments.A sensitivity analysis was then conducted to identify the optimal parameters of the proposed method.Three field cases,a natural rock mass outcrop and two excavated rock tunnel surfaces,were analyzed using the proposed method to evaluate its validity and efficiency.The results show that the proposed method is more efficient and accurate than the traditional trace mapping method,and the efficiency enhancement is more robust as the number of feature points increases.

Formula for calculating spatial similarity degrees between point clouds on multi-scale maps taking map scale change as the only independent variable

The degree of spatial similarity plays an important role in map generalization, yet there has been no quantitative research into it. To fill this gap, this study first defines map scale change and spatial similarity degree/relation in multi-scale map spaces and then proposes a model for calculating the degree of spatial similarity between a point cloud at one scale and its gener- alized counterpart at another scale. After validation, the new model features 16 points with map scale change as the x coordinate and the degree of spatial similarity as the y coordinate. Finally, using an application for curve fitting, the model achieves an empirical formula that can calculate the degree of spatial similarity using map scale change as the sole independent variable, and vice versa. This formula can be used to automate algorithms for point feature generalization and to determine when to terminate them during the generalization.

Weakly-Supervised Single-view Dense 3D Point Cloud Reconstruction via Differentiable Renderer

In recent years,addressing ill-posed problems by leveraging prior knowledge contained in databases on learning techniques has gained much attention.In this paper,we focus on complete three-dimensional(3D)point cloud reconstruction based on a single red-green-blue(RGB)image,a task that cannot be approached using classical reconstruction techniques.For this purpose,we used an encoder-decoder framework to encode the RGB information in latent space,and to predict the 3D structure of the considered object from different viewpoints.The individual predictions are combined to yield a common representation that is used in a module combining camera pose estimation and rendering,thereby achieving differentiability with respect to imaging process and the camera pose,and optimization of the two-dimensional prediction error of novel viewpoints.Thus,our method allows end-to-end training and does not require supervision based on additional ground-truth(GT)mask annotations or ground-truth camera pose annotations.Our evaluation of synthetic and real-world data demonstrates the robustness of our approach to appearance changes and self-occlusions,through outperformance of current state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy,density,and model completeness.

Feature detection on point clouds via Gabriel Triangles creation and l1 normal reconstruction

In this paper, we present a robust subneighborhoods selection technique for feature detection on point clouds scattered over a piecewise smooth surface. The proposed method first identifies all potential features using covariance analysis of the local- neighborhoods. To further extract the accurate features from potential features, Gabriel triangles are created in local neighborhoods of each potential feature vertex. These triangles tightly attach to underlying surface and effectively reflect the local geometry struc- ture. Applying a shared nearest neighbor clustering algorithm on ~ 1 reconstructed normals of created triangle set, we classify the lo- cal neighborhoods of the potential feature vertex into multiple subneighborhoods. Each subneighborhood indicates a piecewise smooth surface. The final feature vertex is identified by checking whether it is locating on the intersection of the multiple surfaces. An advantage of this framework is that it is not only robust to noise, but also insensitive to the size of selected neighborhoods. Ex- perimental results on a variety of models are used to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

A voxel-based fine-scale 3D landscape pattern analysis using laser scanner point clouds

The landscape pattern metrics can quantitatively describe the characteristics of landscape pattern and are widely used in various fields of landscape ecology.Due to the lack of vertical information,2D landscape metrics cannot delineate the vertical characteristics of landscape pattern.Based on the point clouds,a high-resolution voxel model and several voxel-based 3D landscape metrics were constructed in this study and 3D metrics calculation results were compared with that of 2D metrics.The results showed that certain quantifying difference exists between 2D and 3D landscape metrics.For landscapes with different components and spatial configurations,significant difference was disclosed between 2D and 3D landscape metrics.3D metrics can better reflect the real spatial structure characteristics of the landscape than 2D metrics.

Individual tree segmentation and biomass estimation based on UAV Digital aerial photograph

Digital aerial photograph(DAP)data is processed based on Structure from Motion(Sf M)algorithm and regional net adjustment method to generate digital surface discrete point clouds similar to Light Detection and Ranging(LiDAR)and digital orthophoto mosaic(DOM)similar to optical remote sensing image.In this study,we obtained highresolution images of mature forests of Chinese fir by unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)flying through crossroute flight,and then reconstructed the threedimensional point clouds in the UAV aerial area by SfM technique.The point cloud segmentation(PCS)algorithm was used for the individual tree segmentation,and the F-score of the three sample plots were 0.91,0.94,and 0.94,respectively.Individual tree biomass modeling was conducted using 155 mature Chinese fir forests which were correctly segmented.The relative root mean squared error(rRMSE)values of random forest(RF),bagged tree(BT)and support vector regression(SVR)were 34.48%,35.74%and 40.93%,respectively.Our study demonstrated that DAP point clouds had great potential to extract forest vertical parameters and could be applied successfully in individual tree segmentation and individual tree biomass modeling.

Application of 3D Digital Modeling Technology in the Construction of Digital Cities

The concepts of “digital twins”, “3D real scene”, “metacosm” and others were the technical paths for building digital cities with the development of emerging surveying and mapping science and technology, which was to build a digital and virtualized city that matched the real physical world, to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between all elements of the physical world and the digital virtual world. And one of its basic geographic information data was a highly similar, virtual simulation of the 3D real scene. After exploring the traditional manual 3DsMax modeling, UAV low-altitude digital oblique photogrammetry modeling, airborne laser scanning modeling and other single modeling technologies, this paper discussed the 3D digital modeling technology used by the UAV airborne laser scanning point cloud and low-altitude digital oblique photogrammetry for complementary integration, constructing the 3D scene of the digital city. This paper expounded the technical route and production process of 3D digital modeling, in order to provide technical references for related projects.

Nearest Neighbor Sampling of Point Sets Using Rays

We propose a new framework for the sampling,compression,and analysis of distributions of point sets and other geometric objects embedded in Euclidean spaces.Our approach involves constructing a tensor called the RaySense sketch,which captures nearest neighbors from the underlying geometry of points along a set of rays.We explore various operations that can be performed on the RaySense sketch,leading to different properties and potential applications.Statistical information about the data set can be extracted from the sketch,independent of the ray set.Line integrals on point sets can be efficiently computed using the sketch.We also present several examples illustrating applications of the proposed strategy in practical scenarios.

A point cloud deep neural network metamodel method for aerodynamic prediction

Aiming to reduce the high expense of 3-Dimensional(3D)aerodynamics numerical sim-ulations and overcome the limitations of the traditional parametric learning methods,a point cloud deep learning non-parametric metamodel method is proposed in this paper.The 3D geometric data,corresponding to the object boundaries,are chosen as point clouds and a deep learning neural net-work metamodel fed by the point clouds is further established based on the PointNet architecture.This network can learn an end-to-end mapping between spatial positions of the object surface and CFD numerical quantities.With the proposed aerodynamic metamodel approach,the point clouds are constructed by collecting the coordinates of grid vertices on the object surface in a CFD domain,which can maintain the boundary smoothness and allow the network to detect small changes between geometries.Moreover,the point clouds are easily accessible from 3D sensors.The point cloud deep learning neural network,which employs re-sampling technique,the spatial transformer network and the fully connected layer,is developed to predict the aerodynamic char-acteristics of 3D geometry.The effectiveness of the proposed metamodel method is further verified by aerodynamic prediction and robust shape optimization of the ONERA M6 wing.The results show that the proposed method can achieve more satisfactory agreement with the experimental measurements compared to the parametric-learning-based deep neural network.

Point cloud completion via structured feature maps using a feedback network

In this paper,we tackle the challenging problem of point cloud completion from the perspective of feature learning.Our key observation is that to recover the underlying structures as well as surface details,given partial input,a fundamental component is a good feature representation that can capture both global structure and local geometric details.We accordingly first propose FSNet,a feature structuring module that can adaptively aggregate point-wise features into a 2D structured feature map by learning multiple latent patterns from local regions.We then integrate FSNet into a coarse-to-fine pipeline for point cloud completion.Specifically,a 2D convolutional neural network is adopted to decode feature maps from FSNet into a coarse and complete point cloud.Next,a point cloud upsampling network is used to generate a dense point cloud from the partial input and the coarse intermediate output.To efficiently exploit local structures and enhance point distribution uniformity,we propose IFNet,a point upsampling module with a self-correction mechanism that can progressively refine details of the generated dense point cloud.We have conducted qualitative and quantitative experiments on ShapeNet,MVP,and KITTI datasets,which demonstrate that our method outperforms stateof-the-art point cloud completion approaches.

COMPUTING HARMONIC MAPS AND CONFORMAL MAPS ON POINT CLOUDS

We use a narrow-band approach to compute harmonic maps and conformal maps for surfaces embedded in the Euclidean 3-space,using point cloud data only.Given a surface,or a point cloud approximation,we simply use the standard cubic lattice to approximate itsϵ-neighborhood.Then the harmonic map of the surface can be approximated by discrete harmonic maps on lattices.The conformal map,or the surface uniformization,is achieved by minimizing the Dirichlet energy of the harmonic map while deforming the target surface of constant curvature.We propose algorithms and numerical examples for closed surfaces and topological disks.To the best of the authors’knowledge,our approach provides the first meshless method for computing harmonic maps and uniformizations of higher genus surfaces.

Automatic registration of MLS point clouds and SfM meshes of urban area

Recent advances in 3D scanning technologies allow us to acquire accurate and dense 3D scan data of large-scale environments efficiently.Currently,there are various methods for acquiring largescale 3D scan data,such as Mobile Laser Scanning(MLS),Airborne Laser Scanning,Terrestrial Laser Scanning,photogrammetry and Structure from Motion(SfM).Especially,MLS is useful to acquire dense point clouds of road and road-side objects,and SfM is a powerful technique to reconstruct meshes with textures from a set of digital images.In this research,a registration method of point clouds from vehicle-based MLS(MLS point cloud),and textured meshes from the SfM of aerial photographs(SfM mesh),is proposed for creating high-quality surface models of urban areas by combining them.In general,SfM mesh has non-scale information;therefore,scale,position,and orientation of the SfM mesh are adjusted in the registration process.In our method,first,2D feature points are extracted from both SfM mesh and MLS point cloud.This process consists of ground-and building-plane extraction by region growing,random sample consensus and least square method,vertical edge extraction by detecting intersections between the planes,and feature point extraction by intersection tests between the ground plane and the edges.Then,the corresponding feature points between the MLS point cloud and the SfM mesh are searched efficiently,using similarity invariant features and hashing.Next,the coordinate transformation is applied to the SfM mesh so that the ground planes and corresponding feature points are adjusted.Finally,scaling Iterative Closest Point algorithm is applied for accurate registration.Experimental results for three data-sets show that our method is effective for the registration of SfM mesh and MLS point cloud of urban areas including buildings.

BLNet:Bidirectional learning network for point clouds

The key challenge in processing point clouds lies in the inherent lack of ordering and irregularity of the 3D points.By relying on per-point multi-layer perceptions(MLPs),most existing point-based approaches only address the first issue yet ignore the second one.Directly convolving kernels with irregular points will result in loss of shape information.This paper introduces a novel point-based bidirectional learning network(BLNet)to analyze irregular 3D points.BLNet optimizes the learning of 3D points through two iterative operations:feature-guided point shifting and feature learning from shifted points,so as to minimise intra-class variances,leading to a more regular distribution.On the other hand,explicitly modeling point positions leads to a new feature encoding with increased structure-awareness.Then,an attention pooling unit selectively combines important features.This bidirectional learning alternately regularizes the point cloud and learns its geometric features,with these two procedures iteratively promoting each other for more effective feature learning.Experiments show that BLNet is able to learn deep point features robustly and efficiently,and outperforms the prior state-of-the-art on multiple challenging tasks.

Surface reconstruction from unorganized point clouds based on edge growing

Owing to unorganized point cloud data,unexpected triangles,such as holes and slits,may be generated during mesh surface reconstruction.To solve this problem,a mesh surface reconstruction method based on edge growing from unorganized point clouds is proposed.The method first constructs an octree structure for unorganized point cloud data,and determines the k-nearest neighbor for each point.Subsequently,the method searches for flat areas in the point clouds to be used as the initial mesh edge growth regions,to avoid incorrect reconstruction of the mesh surface owing to the growth of initial sharp areas.Finally,the optimal mesh surface is obtained by controlling the mesh edge growing based on compulsive restriction and comprehensive optimization criteria.The experimental results of mesh surface reconstruction show that the method is feasible and shows high reconstruction performance without introducing holes or slits in the reconstructed mesh surface.

Using modular 3D digital earth applications based on point clouds for the study of complex sites

This article discusses the use of 3D technologies in digital earth applications(DEAs)to study complex sites.These are large areas containing objects with heterogeneous shapes and semantic information.The study proposes that DEAs should be modular,have multi-tier architectures,and be developed as Free and Open Source Software if possible.In DEAs requiring high reliability in the 3D measurements,point clouds are proposed as basis for the 3D Digital digital earth representation.For the development of DEAs,we propose to follow a workflow with four components:data acquisition and processing,data management,data analysis and data visualization.For every component,technological challenges of using 3D technologies are identified and solutions applied for a case study are presented.The case study is a modular 3D DEA developed for the archaeological project Mapping the Via Appia.The 3D DEA allows archaeologists to virtually analyze a complex study area.

Fast registration of forest terrestrial laser scans using key points detected from crowns and stems

Registration of TLS data is an important prerequisite to overcome the limitations of occlusion.Most existing registration methods rely on stems to determine the transformation parameters.However,the complexity of the registration problem increases dramatically as the number of stems grows.It is tricky to reduce the stems and determine the valid ones that can provide reliable registration transformation without a knowledge of the two scans.This paper presents an automatic and fast registration of TLS point clouds in forest areas.It reduces stems by selecting from the overlap areas,which are recovered from the mode-based key points that are detected from crowns.The proposed method was tested in a managed forest in Finland,and was compared with the stem-based registration method without reducing stems.The experiments demonstrated that the mean rotation error was 2.09′,and the mean errors in horizontal and vertical translation were 1.13 and 7.21 cm,respectively.Compared with the stem-based method,the proposed method improves the registration efficiency significantly(818 s vs 96 s)and achieves similar results in terms of the mean registration errors(1.94′for rotation error,0.83 and 7.38 cm for horizontal and vertical translation error,respectively).