Classification Of Light Detection And Ranging Data Research Articles

Detection of urban features by multilevel classification of multispectral airborne LiDAR data fused with very high-resolution images

A complex pattern of urban demographic transition has been taking shape since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The long-standing rural-to-urban route of population migration that has propelled waves of massive urbanization over the decades is increasingly being juxtaposed with a reverse movement, as the pandemic drives urban dwellers to suburban communities. The changing dynamics of the flow of residents to and from urban areas underscore the necessity of comprehensive urban land-use mapping for urban planning/management/assessment. These maps are essential for anticipating the rapidly evolving demands of the urban populace and mitigating the environmental and social consequences of uncontrolled urban expansion. The integration of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and imagery data provides an opportunity for urban planning projects to take advantage of its complementary geometric and radiometric characteristics, respectively, with a potential increase in urban mapping accuracies. We enhance the color-based segmentation algorithm for object-based classification of multispectral LiDAR point clouds fused with very high-resolution imagery data acquired for a residential urban study area. We propose a multilevel classification using multilayer perceptron neural networks through vectors of geometric and spectral features structured in different classification scenarios. After an investigation of all classification scenarios, the proposed method achieves an overall mapping accuracy exceeding 98%, combining the original and calculated feature vectors and their output space projected by principal components analysis. This combination also eliminates some misclassifications among classes. We used splits of training, validation, and testing subsets and the k-fold cross-validation to quantitatively assess the classification scenarios. The proposed work improves the color-based segmentation algorithm to fit object-based classification applications and examines multiple classification scenarios. The presented scenarios prove superiority in developing urban mapping accuracies. The various feature spaces suggest the best urban mapping applications based on the available characteristics of the obtained data.

LiDAR Data Classification Based on Automatic Designed CNN

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data classification. Although CNNs achieve good classification performance for LiDAR data classification, a lot of efforts are needed to design a proper architecture. In this letter, the automatic modularized design of CNN is explored for LiDAR data classification for the first time. First, a searchable architecture containing convolution and pooling operations is used to establish the search space. Then, the optimal building block (i.e., cell), which is the basic part of a deep CNN, is obtained from search space by a gradient decent-based algorithm. At last, by stacking several optimal building blocks, a deep CNN can be formulated for LiDAR data classification. Moreover, in order to mitigate the overfitting problem in training a CNN, improved label smoothing and feature regularization are proposed to further improve the classification performance of LiDAR data. The proposed classification models are evaluated on two popular LiDAR data sets (i.e., the Bayview Park and Houston data sets). The experimental results show that the proposed models provide the competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Land Cover Classification of Multispectral LiDAR Data With an Efficient Self-Attention Capsule Network

Periodically conducting land cover mapping plays a vital role in monitoring the status and changes of the land use. The up-to-date and accurate land use database serves importantly for a wide range of applications. This letter constructs an efficient self-attention capsule network (ESA-CapsNet) for land cover classification of multispectral light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. First, formulated with a novel capsule encoder–decoder architecture, the ESA-CapsNet performs promisingly in extracting high-level, informative, and strong feature semantics for pixel-wise land cover classification by using the five types of rasterized feature images. Furthermore, designed with a novel capsule-based attention module, the channel and spatial feature encodings are comprehensively exploited to boost the feature saliency and robustness. The ESA-CapsNet is evaluated on two multispectral LiDAR data sets and achieves an advantageous performance with the overall accuracy, average accuracy, and kappa coefficient of over 98.42%, 95.15%, and 0.9776, respectively. Comparative experiments with the existing methods also demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the ESA-CapsNet in land cover classification tasks.

Tree species classification of LiDAR data based on 3D deep learning

Accurate tree species identification is essential for ecological evaluation and other forest applications. In this paper, we proposed a point-based deep neural network called LayerNet. For light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data in forest regions, the network can divide multiple overlapping layers in Euclidean space to obtain the local three-dimensional (3D) structural features of the tree. The features of all layers are aggregated, and the global feature is obtained by convolution to classify the tree species. To validate the proposed framework, multiple experiments, including airborne and ground-based LiDAR datasets, are conducted and compared with several existing tree species classification algorithms. The test results show that LayerNet can directly use 3D data to accurately classify tree species, with the highest classification accuracy of 92.5%. Also, the results of comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework has obvious advantages in classification accuracy and provides an effective solution for tree species classification tasks.

Classification of raw LiDAR point cloud using point-based methods with spatial features for 3D building reconstruction

Building extraction from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data for 3-dimensional (3D) reconstruction requires accurately classified LiDAR points. In recent years, approaches developed for the classification mostly based on gridded LiDAR data. In the gridding process of LiDAR data, there is a characteristic point loss which results in reduced height accuracy. The effect of such loss can be eliminated using classified raw LiDAR data. In this study, an automatic point-based classification approach for raw LiDAR data classification with spatial features has been proposed for 3D building reconstruction. Using spatial features, the hierarchical rules have been determined. The spatial features, such as height, the local environment, and multi-return, of the LiDAR points were analyzed, and every single LiDAR points automatically assigned to the classes based on these features. The proposed classification approach based on raw LiDAR data had an overall accuracy of 79.7% in the test site located in Istanbul, Turkey. Finally, 3D building reconstruction was performed using the results of the proposed automatic point-based classification approach.

Classification Airbrone LiDAR Point cloud Data

Land cover classification information plays a very important role in various applications. Airborne Light detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data is widely used in remote sensing application for the classification of land cover. The present study presents a Spatial classification method using Terrasoild macros . The data used in this study are a LiDAR point cloud data with the wavelength of green:532nm, near infrared:1064nm and mid-infrared-1550nm and High Resolution RGB data. The classification is carried in TERRASCAN Module with twelve land cover classes. The classification accuracies were assessed using high resolution RGB data. From the results it is concluded that the LiDAR data classification with overall accuracy and kappa coefficient 85.2% and 0.7562.

Joint Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Using Hierarchical Random Walk and Deep CNN Architecture

Earth observation using multisensor data is drawing increasing attention. Fusing remotely sensed hyperspectral imagery and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data helps to increase application performance. In this article, joint classification of hyperspectral imagery and LiDAR data is investigated using an effective hierarchical random walk network (HRWN). In the proposed HRWN, a dual-tunnel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is first developed to capture spectral and spatial features. A pixelwise affinity branch is proposed to capture the relationships between classes with different elevation information from LiDAR data and confirm the spatial contrast of classification. Then in the designed hierarchical random walk layer, the predicted distribution of dual-tunnel CNN serves as global prior while pixelwise affinity reflects the local similarity of pixel pairs, which enforce spatial consistency in the deeper layers of networks. Finally, a classification map is obtained by calculating the probability distribution. Experimental results validated with three real multisensor remote sensing data demonstrate that the proposed HRWN significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. For example, the two branches CNN classifier achieves an accuracy of 88.91% on the University of Houston campus data set, while the proposed HRWN classifier obtains an accuracy of 93.61%, resulting in an improvement of approximately 5%.

Deep Encoder–Decoder Networks for Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data

Deep learning (DL) has been garnering increasing attention in remote sensing (RS) due to its powerful data representation ability. In particular, deep models have been proven to be effective for RS data classification based on a single given modality. However, with one single modality, the ability in identifying the materials remains limited due to the lack of feature diversity. To overcome this limitation, we present a simple but effective multimodal DL baseline by following a deep encoder–decoder network architecture, EndNet for short, for the classification of hyperspectral and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. EndNet fuses the multimodal information by enforcing the fused features to reconstruct the multimodal input in turn. Such a reconstruction strategy is capable of better activating the neurons across modalities compared with some conventional and widely used fusion strategies, e.g., early fusion, middle fusion, and late fusion. Extensive experiments conducted on two popular hyperspectral and LiDAR data sets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed EndNet in comparison with several state-of-the-art baselines in the hyperspectral-LiDAR classification task. The codes will be available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_GRSL_EndNet</uri> , contributing to the RS community.

Multiple Feature-Based Superpixel-Level Decision Fusion for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Classification

The rapid increase in the number of remote sensing sensors makes it possible to develop multisource feature extraction and fusion techniques to improve the classification accuracy of surface materials. It has been reported that light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data can contribute complementary information to hyperspectral images (HSIs). In this article, a multiple feature-based superpixel-level decision fusion (MFSuDF) method is proposed for HSIs and LiDAR data classification. Specifically, superpixel-guided kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is first designed and applied to HSIs to both reduce the dimensions and compress the noise impact. Next, 2-D and 3-D Gabor filters are, respectively, employed on the KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data to obtain discriminative Gabor features, and the magnitude and phase information are both taken into account. Three different modules, including the raw data-based feature cube (concatenated KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data), the Gabor magnitude feature cube, and the Gabor phase feature cube (concatenation of the corresponding Gabor features extracted from the KPCA-reduced HSIs and LiDAR data), can be, thus, achieved. After that, random forest (RF) classifier and quadrant bit coding (QBC) are introduced to separately accomplish the classification task on the aforementioned three extracted feature cubes. Alternatively, two superpixel maps are generated by utilizing the multichannel simple noniterative clustering (SNIC) and entropy rate superpixel segmentation (ERS) algorithms on the combined HSIs and LiDAR data, which are then used to regularize the three classification maps. Finally, a weighted majority voting-based decision fusion strategy is incorporated to effectively enhance the joint use of the multisource data. The proposed approach is, thus, named MFSuDF. A series of experiments are conducted on three real-world data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFSuDF approach. The experimental results show that our MFSuDF can achieve the overall accuracy of 73.64%, 93.88%, and 74.11% for Houston, Trento, and Missouri University and University of Florida (MUUFL) Gulport data sets, respectively, when there are only three samples per class for training.

EFFICIENT LARGE-SCALE AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA CLASSIFICATION VIA FULLY CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK

Abstract. Nowadays, we are witnessing an increasing availability of large-scale airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data, that greatly improve our knowledge of urban areas and natural environment. In order to extract useful information from these massive point clouds, appropriate data processing is required, including point cloud classification. In this paper we present a deep learning method to efficiently perform the classification of large-scale LiDAR data, ensuring a good trade-off between speed and accuracy. The algorithm employs the projection of the point cloud into a two-dimensional image, where every pixel stores height, intensity, and echo information of the point falling in the pixel. The image is then segmented by a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN), assigning a label to each pixel and, consequently, to the corresponding point. In particular, the proposed approach is applied to process a dataset of 7700 km2 that covers the entire Friuli Venezia Giulia region (Italy), allowing to distinguish among five classes (ground, vegetation, roof, overground and power line), with an overall accuracy of 92.9%.

Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Using Coupled CNNs

In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective framework to fuse hyperspectral and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data using two coupled convolutional neural networks (CNNs). One CNN is designed to learn spectral-spatial features from hyperspectral data, and the other one is used to capture the elevation information from LiDAR data. Both of them consist of three convolutional layers, and the last two convolutional layers are coupled together via a parameter sharing strategy. In the fusion phase, feature-level and decision-level fusion methods are simultaneously used to integrate these heterogeneous features sufficiently. For the feature-level fusion, three different fusion strategies are evaluated, including the concatenation strategy, the maximization strategy, and the summation strategy. For the decision-level fusion, a weighted summation strategy is adopted, where the weights are determined by the classification accuracy of each output. The proposed model is evaluated on an urban data set acquired over Houston, USA, and a rural one captured over Trento, Italy. On the Houston data, our model can achieve a new record overall accuracy of 96.03%. On the Trento data, it achieves an overall accuracy of 99.12%. These results sufficiently certify the effectiveness of our proposed model.

A framework for automatic classification of mobile LiDAR data using multiple regions and 3D CNN architecture

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a framework for automatic classification of mobile laser scanner (MLS) point cloud using multi-faceted multi-object convolutional neural network (MMCN). The proposed method takes a full three-dimensional (3D) point cloud as input and outputs a class label for each point. Unlike other existing classification methods for MLS data, the proposed method is not dependent on any parameter or its tuning. The proposed MMCN uses multiple objects of a sample, defined by different sizes of the sample, in addition to the different facets obtained by rotating about the various axes, thus adding more information during the training and testing stages. The proposed framework uses manually extracted samples for training the MMCN. Automatically extracted multiple regions based on the various radii of spherical neighbourhoods around MLS points are passed through the trained MMCN for determining their probabilities of belonging to different classes. The class probabilities of different sized regions are then used as a feature vector to train a support vector machine (SVM), and the final decision for the class of a point is based on the SVM output. The proposed framework has been trained for five classes, viz., Ground, House, Pole, Tree, and Car and has been tested on Oakland and Paris-Lille 3D MLS datasets. The total accuracy and kappa coefficient (κ) reach up to 96.5% and 93.8%, respectively, for the framework. The MMCN together with the SVM is able to achieve parameter-free classification of MLS data, thereby eliminating the need for manual parameter tuning as in the existing methods. Therefore, besides the use for classification of MLS data for mapping purpose, the approach is also suitable for classification of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data resulting from autonomous vehicle sensors. The accuracy of this work can be further improved by incorporating more and varied training samples and deeper convolutional neural network (CNN) with better hardware resources.

LiDAR Data Classification Based on Improved Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data contains the height of different objects and records the elevation information of ground objects, so it plays an important role in land classification. In recent years, deep learning has been widely used in LiDAR data classification due to its strong ability to extract features. However, deep learning methods usually need sufficient training data to achieve better classification results. In order to solve this problem, a new classification method combined conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) with residual unit and DropBlock, is proposed here for the classification of LiDAR data, called as RDB-CGAN. CGAN expands the generated samples to training data to improve the classification performance when the training samples are relatively small. Residual unit increases the network depth of the generator to improve its generation capability and utilizes shortcut connection to transfer the input information directly to the output to solve degradation caused by increased network depth. DropBlock improved the generalization of the network by dropping a whole area with spatial information correlation so that the network can learn the remaining features. The experimental results on two different LiDAR datasets show that RDB-CGAN significantly improved the classification performance of LiDAR data compared to several state-of-the-art classification methods.

Inverse Coefficient of Variation Feature and Multilevel Fusion Technique for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Classification

Multisource remote sensing data contain complementary information on land covers, but fusing them is a challenging problem due to the heterogeneous nature of the data. This article aims to extract and integrate information from hyperspectral image (HSI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data for land cover classification. As there is a scarcity of a large number of training samples for remotely sensed hyperspectral and LiDAR data, in this article, we propose a model, which is able to perform impressively using a limited number of training samples by extracting effective features representing different characteristics of objects of interest from these two complementary data sources (HSI and LiDAR). A novel feature extraction method named inverse coefficient of variation (ICV) is introduced for HSI, which considers the Gaussian probability of neighborhood between every pair of bands. We, then, propose a two-stream feature fusion approach to integrate the ICV feature with several features extracted from HSI and LiDAR data. We incorporate a fusion unit named canonical correlation analysis as a basic unit for fusing two different sets of features within each stream. We also incorporate the concept of ensemble classification where the features produced by two-stream fusion are distributed into subsets and transformed to improve the feature quality. We compare our method with the existing state-of-the-art methods, which are based on deep learning or handcrafted feature extraction or using both of them. Experimental results show that our proposed approach performs better than other existing methods with a limited number of training samples.

Classification of LiDAR Data Combined Octave Convolution With Capsule Network

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data are widely used for high-resolution land cover mapping, which can provide very valuable information about the height of the surveyed area for the discrimination of classes. In order to utilize the advantages of deep models for the classification of LiDAR-derived features, a new classification algorithm combined Octave Convolution (OctConv) with Capsule Network (CapsNet), is proposed here to hierarchically extract robust and discriminant features of the input data, called as OctConv-CapsNet. In the proposed approach, CapsNet captures the spatial information of the data, and OctConv processes separately for high- and low-frequency feature. OctConv is embedded in the primary capsule layer of CapsNet so that the proposed approach can make the most of both the spatial information and the high- and low-frequency information simultaneously. The proposed framework performs experiments on two LiDAR-DSM datasets (i.e. Bayview Park and Recology datasets). The results show that, compared with the traditional deep convolution model, OctConv-CapsNet can improve the classification accuracy of LiDAR-DSM data, and when the number of training samples of the experiment is 800, the classification accuracies reached 96.12% and 96.79% on Bayview Park and Recology datasets, respectively.

A Dual Neural Architecture Combined SqueezeNet with OctConv for LiDAR Data Classification.

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a frequently used technique of data acquisition and it is widely used in diverse practical applications. In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown their effectiveness for LiDAR-derived rasterized digital surface models (LiDAR-DSM) data classification. However, many excellent CNNs have too many parameters due to depth and complexity. Meanwhile, traditional CNNs have spatial redundancy because different convolution kernels scan and store information independently. SqueezeNet replaces a part of 3 × 3 convolution kernels in CNNs with 1 × 1 convolution kernels, decomposes the original one convolution layer into two layers, and encapsulates them into a Fire module. This structure can reduce the parameters of network. Octave Convolution (OctConv) pools some feature maps firstly and stores them separately from the feature maps with the original size. It can reduce spatial redundancy by sharing information between the two groups. In this article, in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the network simultaneously, Fire modules of SqueezeNet are used to replace the traditional convolution layers in OctConv to form a new dual neural architecture: OctSqueezeNet. Our experiments, conducted using two well-known LiDAR datasets and several classical state-of-the-art classification methods, revealed that our proposed classification approach based on OctSqueezeNet is able to provide competitive advantages in terms of both classification accuracy and computational amount.

Two-Layered Graph-Cuts-Based Classification of LiDAR Data in Urban Areas.

Classifying the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point cloud in the urban environment is a challenging task. Due to the complicated structures of urban objects, it is difficult to find suitable features and classifiers to efficiently category the points. A two-layered graph-cuts-based classification framework is addressed in this study. The hierarchical framework includes a bottom layer that defines the features and classifies point clouds at the point level as well as a top layer that defines the features and classifies the point cloud at the object level. A novel adaptive local modification method is employed to model the interactions between these two layers. The iterative graph cuts algorithm runs around the bottom and top layers to optimize the classification. In this way, the addressed framework benefits from the integration of point features and object features to improve the classification. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of producing classification results with high accuracy and efficiency.

Full-Waveform Airborne LiDAR Data Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Point cloud classification is one of the most important and time-consuming stages of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data processing, playing a key role in the generation of cartographic products. This paper describes an innovative algorithm to perform LiDAR point-cloud classification, which relies on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and takes advantage of full-waveform data registered by modern laser scanners. The proposed method consists of two steps. First, a simple CNN is used to preprocess each waveform, providing a compact representation of the data. By exploiting the coordinates of the points associated with the waveforms, output vectors generated by the first CNN are then mapped into an image that is subsequently segmented by a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN): a label is assigned to each pixel and, consequently, to the point falling in the pixel. In this way, spatial positions and geometrical relationships between neighboring data are taken into account. These particular architectures allow to accurately identify even challenging classes such as power line and transmission tower.

Preregistration Classification of Mobile LIDAR Data Using Spatial Correlations

We explore a novel paradigm for light detection and ranging (LIDAR) point classification in mobile laser scanning (MLS). In contrast to the traditional scheme of performing classification for a 3-D point cloud after registration, our algorithm operates on the raw data stream classifying the points on-the-fly before registration. Hence, we call it preregistration classification (PRC). Specifically, this technique is based on spatial correlations, i.e., local range measurements supporting each other. The proposed method is general since exact scanner pose information is not required, nor is any radiometric calibration needed. Also, we show that the method can be applied in different environments by adjusting two control parameters, without the results being overly sensitive to this adjustment. As results, we present classification of points from an urban environment where noise, ground, buildings, and vegetation are distinguished from each other, and points from the forest where tree stems and ground are classified from the other points. As computations are efficient and done with a minimal cache, the proposed methods enable new on-chip deployable algorithmic solutions. Broader benefits from the spatial correlations and the computational efficiency of the PRC scheme are likely to be gained in several online and offline applications. These range from single robotic platform operations including simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms to wall-clock time savings in geoinformation industry. Finally, PRC is especially attractive for continuous-beam and solid-state LIDARs that are prone to output noisy data.

Coupled Higher-Order Tensor Factorization for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Fusion and Classification

Hyperspectral and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data fusion and classification has been an active research topic, and intensive studies have been made based on mathematical morphology. However, matrix-based concatenation of morphological features may not be so distinctive, compact, and optimal for classification. In this work, we propose a novel Coupled Higher-Order Tensor Factorization (CHOTF) model for hyperspectral and LiDAR data classification. The innovative contributions of our work are that we model different features as multiple third-order tensors, and we formulate a CHOTF model to jointly factorize those tensors. Firstly, third-order tensors are built based on spectral-spatial features extracted via attribute profiles (APs). Secondly, the CHOTF model is defined to jointly factorize the multiple higher-order tensors. Then, the latent features are generated by mode-n tensor-matrix product based on the shared and unshared factors. Lastly, classification is conducted by using sparse multinomial logistic regression (SMLR). Experimental results, conducted with two popular hyperspectral and LiDAR data sets collected over the University of Houston and the city of Trento, respectively, indicate that the proposed framework outperforms the other methods, i.e., different dimensionality-reduction-based methods, independent third-order tensor factorization based methods, and some recently proposed hyperspectral and LiDAR data fusion and classification methods.