Dissimilarity weighting for graph-based point cloud segmentation using local surface gradients

Abstract

Processing of 3D point cloud data is seen as a problem due to the difficulties of processing millions of unstructured points. The point cloud segmentation process is a crucial pre-classification stage such that it reduces the high processing time required to extract meaningful information from raw data and produces some distinctive features for the classification stage. Local surface inclinations of objects are the most effective features of 3D point clouds to provide meaningful information about the objects. Sampling the points into sub-volumes (voxels) is a technique commonly used in the literature to obtain the required neighboring point groups to calculate local surface directions (with normal vectors). The graph-based segmentation approaches are widely used for the surface segmentation using the attributes of the local surface orientations and continuities. In this study, only two geometrical primitives which are normal vectors and barycenters of point groups are used to weight the connections between the adjacent voxels (vertices). The defined 14 possible dissimilarity calculations of three angular values getting from the primitives are experimented and evaluated on five sample datasets that have reference data for segmentation. Finally, the results of the measures are compared in terms of accuracy and F1 score. According to the results, the weight measure W7 (seventh calculation) gives 0.8026 accuracy and 0.7305 F1 score with higher standard deviations, while the original weight measure (W8) of the segmentation method gives 0.7890 accuracy and 0.6774 F1 score with lower standard deviations.