Automatic region-growing system for the segmentation of large point clouds

3D point cloud; RANSAC; Region-growing; Segmentation; Unsupervised clustering; Multilevels; Planar region; Point-clouds; Potential variations; Region growing; Scale-up; Control and Systems Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Building and Construction

Abstract :

[en] This article describes a complete unsupervised system for the segmentation of massive 3D point clouds. Our system bridges the missing components that permit to go from 99% automation to 100% automation for the construction industry. It scales up to billions of 3D points and targets a generic low-level grouping of planar regions usable by a wide range of applications. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical multi-level segment definition to cope with potential variations in high-level object definitions. The approach first leverages planar predominance in scenes through a normal-based region growing. Then, for usability and simplicity, we designed an automatic heuristic to determine without user supervision three RANSAC-inspired parameters. These are the distance threshold for the region growing, the threshold for the minimum number of points needed to form a valid planar region, and the decision criterion for adding points to a region. Our experiments are conducted on 3D scans of complex buildings to test the robustness of the “one-click” method in varying scenarios. Labelled and instantiated point clouds from different sensors and platforms (depth sensor, terrestrial laser scanner, hand-held laser scanner, mobile mapping system), in different environments (indoor, outdoor, buildings) and with different objects of interests (AEC-related, BIM-related, navigation-related) are provided as a new extensive test-bench. The current implementation processes ten million points per minutes on a single thread CPU configuration. Moreover, the resulting segments are tested for the high-level task of semantic segmentation over 14 classes, to achieve an F1-score of 90+ averaged over all datasets while reducing the training phase to a fraction of state of the art point-based deep learning methods. We provide this baseline along with six new open-access datasets with 300+ million hand-labelled and instantiated 3D points at: https://www.graphics.rwth-aachen.de/project/45/.

Disciplines :

Computer science

Author, co-author :

Poux, Florent ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de géographie > Unité de Géomatique - Topographie et géométrologie

Mattes, C.; Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Selman, Z.; Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Kobbelt, L.; Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Language :

English

Title :

Automatic region-growing system for the segmentation of large point clouds

Alternative titles :

[fr] Système automatique de croissance de région pour la segmentation de larges nuages de points

Publication date :

04 June 2022

Journal title :

Automation in Construction

ISSN :

0926-5805

eISSN :

1872-7891

Publisher :

Elsevier B.V.

Volume :

138

Pages :

104250

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://api.elsevier.com/content/article/PII:S0926580522001236?httpAccept=text/xml

Name of the research project :

Terra Mosana

Funders :

ERDF - European Regional Development Fund [BE]
Interreg Europe

Funding text :

This work was funded by the European Regional Development Fund within the “Terra Mosana” project under the funding code EMR10 .

Data Set :

Large point cloud datasets

Large point cloud datasets for instance segmentation

Available on ORBi :

since 07 June 2022

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