SEMANTIC CHANGE DETECTION OF RIVER GROUND POINTS IN AIRBORNE LIDAR BATHYMETRY DATA USING VOXEL OCCUPANCIES

Abstract. This paper proposes a method to get semantic information of changes in bathymetric point clouds. This method aims for assigning labels to river ground points which determine if either the point can be compared with a reference DEM, if there are no data in the reference or if there are no water points inside the new Data of wet areas of the reference data. This labels can be further used to specify areas where differences of DEMS can be calculated, the comparable areas. The Areas where no reference data is found specify areas where the reference DEM will have a higher variance due to interpolation which should be considered in the comparison. The areas where no water in the new data was found specify areas there no refraction correction in the new data can be done and which should be considered with a higher variance of the ground points or there the water surface should be tried to reconstruct. The proposed approach uses semantic reference data to specify water areas in the new scan. An occupancy analysis is used to specify if voxels of the new data exist in the reference or not. In case of occupancy, the labels of the reference are assigned to the new data and in case of no occupancy, the label of changed data is assigned. A histogram based method is used to separate ground and water points in wet areas and a second occupancy analysis is used to specify the semantic changes in wet areas. The proposed method is evaluated on a proposed data set of the Mangfall area where the ground truth is manually labelled.