Extraction of Objects from Terrestrial Laser Scans by Integrating Geometry Image and Intensity Data with Demonstration on Trees

Abstract

Terrestrial laser scanning is becoming a standard for 3D modeling of complex scenes. Results of the scan contain detailed geometric information about the scene; however, the lack of semantic details still constitutes a gap in ensuring this data is usable for mapping. This paper proposes a framework for recognition of objects in laser scans; aiming to utilize all the available information, range, intensity and color information integrated into the extraction framework. Instead of using the 3D point cloud, which is complex to process since it lacks an inherent neighborhood structure, we propose a polar representation which facilitates low-level image processing tasks, e.g., segmentation and texture modeling. Using attributes of each segment, a feature space analysis is used to classify segments into objects. This process is followed by a fine-tuning stage based on graph-cut algorithm, which considers the 3D nature of the data. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated on tree extraction and tested on scans containing complex objects in addition to trees. Results show a very high detection level and thereby the feasibility of the proposed framework.

Keywords

• object extraction
• terrestrial laser scanner
• point cloud
• data fusion