Segmentation of Unbalanced and In-homogeneous Point Clouds and Its Application to 3D Scanned Trees

Segmentation of 3D point clouds is still an open issue in the case of unbalanced and in-homogeneous data-sets. In the application context of the modeling of botanical trees, a fundamental challenge consists in separating the leaves from the wood. Based on deep learning and a class decision process, we propose an innovative method designed to separate leaf points from wood points in terrestrial LiDAR point clouds of trees. Although simple, our approach learns trees characteristic point patterns efficiently and robustly. To train our 3D deep learning model, we constructed a 3D labeled point cloud data-set of different tree species. Experiments show that our 3D deep representation together with our geometric approach lead to significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in segmentation task.

Presentation Video

Papers

  • Jules Morel, Alexandra Bac, Takashi Kanai: “Segmentation of Unbalanced and In-homogeneous Point Clouds and Its Application to 3D Scanned Trees”, The Visual Computer (Special issue for CGI 2020), Volume 36, Issues 10-12, pp.2419-2431. 2020.
    [Paper (author’s version)][Paper (publisher’s version)][Code (github)]