Terrestrial laser scanning is becoming a common surveying technique to measure quickly and accurately dense point clouds in 3-D. It simplifies measurement tasks on site. However, the massive volume of 3-D point measurements presents a challenge not only because of acquisition time and management of huge volumes of data, but also because of processing limitations on PCs. Raw laser scanner point clouds require a great deal of processing before final products can be derived. Thus, segmentation becomes an essential step whenever grouping of points with common attributes is required, and it is necessary for applications requiring the labelling of point clouds, surface extraction and classification into homogeneous areas. Segmentation algorithms can be classified as surface growing algorithms or clustering algorithms. This paper presents an unsupervised robust clustering approach based on fuzzy methods. Fuzzy parameters are analysed to adapt the unsupervised clustering methods to segmentation of laser scanner data. Both the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm and the Possibilistic C-Means (PCM) mode-seeking algorithm are reviewed and used in combination with a similarity-driven cluster merging method. They constitute the kernel of the unsupervised fuzzy clustering method presented herein. It is applied to three point clouds acquired with different terrestrial laser scanners and scenarios: the first is an artificial (synthetic) data set that simulates a structure with different planar blocks; the second a composition of three metric ceramic gauge blocks (Grade 0, flatness tolerance ± 0.1 μm) recorded with a Konica Minolta Vivid 9i optical triangulation digitizer; the last is an outdoor data set that comes up to a modern architectural building collected from the centre of an open square. The amplitude-modulated-continuous-wave (AMCW) terrestrial laser scanner system, the Faro 880, was used for the acquisition of the latter data set. Experimental analyses of the results from the proposed unsupervised planar segmentation process are shown to be promising.

Unsupervised robust planar segmentation of terrestrial laser scanner point clouds based on fuzzy clustering methods

Segmentation of mobile laser point clouds of urban scenes into objects is an important step for post-processing (e.g., interpretation) of point clouds. Point clouds of urban scenes contain numerous objects with significant size variability, complex and incomplete structures, and holes or variable point densities, raising great challenges for the segmentation of mobile laser point clouds. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a shape-based segmentation method. The proposed method first calculates the optimal neighborhood size of each point to derive the geometric features associated with it, and then classifies the point clouds according to geometric features using support vector machines (SVMs). Second, a set of rules are defined to segment the classified point clouds, and a similarity criterion for segments is proposed to overcome over-segmentation. Finally, the segmentation output is merged based on topological connectivity into a meaningful geometrical abstraction. The proposed method has been tested on point clouds of two urban scenes obtained by different mobile laser scanners. The results show that the proposed method segments large-scale mobile laser point clouds with good accuracy and computationally effective time cost, and that it segments pole-like objects particularly well.

A shape-based segmentation method for mobile laser scanning point clouds

Although a manipulator must interact with objects in terms of their full complexity, it is the qualitative structure of the objects in an environment and the relationships between them which define the composition of that environment, and allow for the construction of efficient plans to enable the completion of various elaborate tasks. In this paper we present an algorithm which redescribes a scene in terms of a layered representation, from labeled point clouds of the objects in the scene. The representation includes a qualitative description of the structure of the objects, as well as the symbolic relationships between them. This is achieved by constructing contact point networks of the objects, which are topological representations of how each object is used in that particular scene, and are based on the regions of contact between objects. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm, by presenting results from the algorithm tested on a database of stereo images. This shows a high percentage of correctly classified relationships, as well as the discovery of interesting topological features. This output provides a layered representation of a scene, giving symbolic meaning to the inter-object relationships useful for subsequent commonsense reasoning and decision making.

Learning spatial relationships between objects

This article presents new improvements to range image segmentation based on edge detection techniques The developed approach better preserves the object's topology and shape even to noisy images The algorithm also does not depend on rigid threshold values, thus being useful in unsupervised systems Experiments were performed in a popular range image database and the results were compared to four other traditional range image segmentation algorithms, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed algorithm

New improvements to range image segmentation by edge detection

A nonparametric clustering algorithm, called cell mean shift (CMS), is developed to extract clusters of a set of points on the Gaussian sphere S^2. It is computationally more efficient than the traditional mean shift (MS). Based on the singular value decomposition, the dimensional analysis is introduced to classify these clusters into point-, curve-, and area-form clusters. Each cluster is the Gaussian image of a set of points which will be examined by a connected search in R^3. An orientation analysis of the Gaussian map to area-form clusters is applied to identify hyperbolic and elliptical regions. A signed point-to-plane distance function is used to identify points of convex and concave regions. Segmentation results of several real as well as synthetic point clouds, together with complexity analyses, are presented.

Automatic segmentation of unorganized noisy point clouds based on the Gaussian map

A range image segmentation contest was organized in conjunction with ICPR'2000. The goal is to continue the effort of experimentally evaluating range image segmentation algorithms initiated by Hoover et al. (1996) and Powell et al. (1998). This paper summarizes the results of the contest.

Some further results of experimental comparison of range image segmentation algorithms

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Some further results of experimental comparison of range image segmentation algorithms