Clustering-Based Plane Segmentation Neural Network for Urban Scene Modeling

Abstract

Urban scene modeling is a challenging but essential task for various applications, such as 3D map generation, city digitization, and AR/VR/metaverse applications. To model man-made structures, such as roads and buildings, which are the major components in general urban scenes, we present a clustering-based plane segmentation neural network using 3D point clouds, called hybrid K-means plane segmentation (HKPS). The proposed method segments unorganized 3D point clouds into planes by training the neural network to estimate the appropriate number of planes in the point cloud based on hybrid K-means clustering. We consider both the Euclidean distance and cosine distance to cluster nearby points in the same direction for better plane segmentation results. Our network does not require any labeled information for training. We evaluated the proposed method using the Virtual KITTI dataset and showed that our method outperforms conventional methods in plane segmentation. Our code is publicly available.

Keywords

• point cloud plane extraction
• 3D point clustering
• 3D segmentation
• urban mapping