DAAL-WS: A weakly-supervised method integrated with data augmentation and active learning strategies for MLS point cloud semantic segmentation

Abstract

Mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds have increasingly been a significant data source for acquiring accurate three-dimensional (3D) semantic information from complex scenes. However, most current point cloud semantic segmentation methods heavily depend on a huge number of manually labeled training samples, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address the above challenge, a weakly-supervised MLS point cloud semantic segmentation method integrated with data augmentation and active learning strategies is proposed (termed DAAL-WS). By taking advantage of our previously presented multi-branch weakly-supervised network (WSPointNet) in weakly supervisory signals and ensemble predictions, the DAAL-WS integrates WSPointNet with two essential components, i.e., an elevation-calibrated Mix3D (EC-Mix3D) data augmentation strategy and a point-level ensemble prediction-based (PLEP) active learning strategy. Specifically, the EC-Mix3D data augmentation strategy leverages elevation information to calibrate sub-point clouds and generates new contextual scenes by mixing the elevation-calibrated sub-point clouds, thereby augmenting the training point cloud distribution. Designed to reduce labeling redundancy, the PLEP active learning strategy selects the most important labeled points for model training. This strategy first measures the uncertainty for each unlabeled point by ensemble predictions and then employs a feature-distance suppression module to select the significant and discriminating unlabeled points for manual labeling. The proposed DAAL-WS method was evaluated on three public MLS datasets, including Toronto3D, Paris-Lille-3D, and WHU-MLS datasets, on which DAAL-WS obtained a competitive performance over fully-supervised baselines using only 0.015 %, 0.03 %, and 0.03 % labeled points, with mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) scores of 81.91 %, 82.59 %, and 60.36 %, respectively.