Deep point embedding for urban classification using ALS point clouds: A new perspective from local to global

Abstract Semantic interpretation of the 3D scene is one of the most challenging problems in point cloud processing, which also deems as an essential task in a wide variety of point cloud applications. The core task of semantic interpretation is semantic labeling, namely, obtaining a unique semantic label for each point in the point cloud. Despite several reported approaches, semantic labeling continues to be a challenge owing to the complexity of scenes, objects of various scales, and the non-homogeneity of unevenly distributed points. In this paper, we propose a novel method for obtaining semantic labels of airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds involving the embedding of local context information for each point with multi-scale deep learning, nonlinear manifold learning for feature dimension reduction, and global graph-based optimization for refining the classification results. Specifically, we address the tasks of learning discriminative features and global labeling smoothing. The key contribution of our study is threefold. First, a hierarchical data augmentation strategy is applied to enhance the learning of deep features based on the PointNet++ network and simultaneously eliminate the artifacts caused by division and sampling while dealing with large-scale datasets. Subsequently, the learned hierarchical deep features are globally optimized and embedded into a low-dimensional space with a nonlinear manifold-based joint learning method with the removal of redundant and disturbing information. Finally, a graph-structured optimization based on the Markov random fields algorithm is performed to achieve global optimization of the initial classification results that are obtained using the embedded deep features by constructing a weighted indirect graph and solving the optimization problem with graph-cuts. We conducted thorough experiments on ALS point cloud datasets to assess the performance of our framework. Results indicate that compared to other commonly used advanced classification methods, our method can achieve high classification accuracy. The overall accuracy (OA) of our approach on the ISPRS benchmark dataset can scale up to 83.2% for classifying nine semantic classes, thereby outperforming other compared point-based strategies. Additionally, we evaluated our framework on a selected portion of the AHN3 dataset, which provided OA up to 91.2%.