Classification Of Light Detection And Ranging Data Research Articles

Supervised spatial classification of multispectral LiDAR data in urban areas.

Multispectral LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data have been initially used for land cover classification. However, there are still high classification uncertainties, especially in urban areas, where objects are often mixed and confounded. This study investigated the efficiency of combining advanced statistical methods and LiDAR metrics derived from multispectral LiDAR data for improving land cover classification accuracy in urban areas. The study area is located in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Multispectral Optech Titan LiDAR data over the study area were acquired on 3 September 2014 in a single strip of 3 km2. Using the channels at 1,550 nm (C1), 1,064 nm (C2) and 532 nm (C3), LiDAR intensity data, normalized digital surface model (nDSM), pseudo normalized difference vegetation index (PseudoNDVI), morphological profiles (MP), and a novel hierarchical morphological profiles (HMP) were derived and used as features for the classification. A support vector machine classifier with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel was applied in the classification stage, where the optimal parameters for the classifier were selected by a grid search procedure. The combination of intensity, pseudoNDVI, nDSM and HMP resulted in the best land cover classification, with an overall accuracy of 93.28%.

Feature Extraction for Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data Using Patch-to-Patch CNN.

Multisensor fusion is of great importance in Earth observation related applications. For instance, hyperspectral images (HSIs) provide wealthy spectral information while light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data provide elevation information, and using HSI and LiDAR data together can achieve better classification performance. In this paper, an unsupervised feature extraction framework, named as patch-to-patch convolutional neural network (PToP CNN), is proposed for collaborative classification of hyperspectral and LiDAR data. More specific, a three-tower PToP mapping is first developed to seek an accurate representation from HSI to LiDAR data, aiming at merging multiscale features between two different sources. Then, by integrating hidden layers of the designed PToP CNN, extracted features are expected to possess deeply fused characteristics. Accordingly, features from different hidden layers are concatenated into a stacked vector and fed into three fully connected layers. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed classification framework, experiments are executed on two benchmark remote sensing data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method provides superior performance when compared with some state-of-the-art classifiers, such as two-branch CNN and context CNN.

LiDAR Data Classification Using Morphological Profiles and Convolutional Neural Networks

In recent years, deep learning-based methods, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown their capabilities in remote sensing data processing. The efficacy of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has been already proven in a wide variety of research areas. Most of the existing methods do not extract the informative features from LiDAR-derived rasterized digital surface models (LiDAR-DSM) data in a deep manner. In order to utilize the advantages of deep models for the classification of LiDAR-derived features, deep CNN is proposed here to hierarchically extract the robust and discriminant features of the input data. Moreover, morphological profiles and multiattribute profiles (MAPs) are investigated to enrich the inputs of the CNN and further to improve the ultimate classification performance. Furthermore, a new activation function, sigmoid-weighted linear units (SiLUs), is introduced. The proposed frameworks are tested on two LiDAR-DSMs (i.e., Bayview Park and Houston data sets). The MAP-CNNs with SiLU outperform original CNNs by 6.62% and 6.88% in terms of overall accuracy on Bayview Park and Houston data sets, respectively, when the number of training samples of each class is 40.

One-Class Classification of Airborne LiDAR Data in Urban Areas Using a Presence and Background Learning Algorithm

Automatic classification of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data in urban areas is of great importance for many applications such as generating three-dimensional (3D) building models and monitoring power lines. Traditional supervised classification methods require training samples of all classes to construct a reliable classifier. However, complete training samples are normally hard and costly to collect, and a common circumstance is that only training samples for a class of interest are available, in which traditional supervised classification methods may be inappropriate. In this study, we investigated the possibility of using a novel one-class classification algorithm, i.e., the presence and background learning (PBL) algorithm, to classify LiDAR data in an urban scenario. The results demonstrated that the PBL algorithm implemented by back propagation (BP) neural network (PBL-BP) could effectively classify a single class (e.g., building, tree, terrain, power line, and others) from airborne LiDAR point cloud with very high accuracy. The mean F-score for all of the classes from the PBL-BP classification results was 0.94, which was higher than those from one-class support vector machine (SVM), biased SVM, and maximum entropy methods (0.68, 0.82 and 0.93, respectively). Moreover, the PBL-BP algorithm yielded a comparable overall accuracy to the multi-class SVM method. Therefore, this method is very promising in the classification of the LiDAR point cloud.

Classification of hyperspectral and LIDAR data using extinction profiles with feature fusion

ABSTRACTHyperspectral images comprise hundreds of narrow contiguous wavelength bands which include wealth spectral information, and a great potential of Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data lies in its benefits of height measurements, which can be used as complementary information for the classification of hyperspectral data. In this paper, a feature-fusion strategy of hyperspectral and LIDAR data is taken into account in order to develop a new classification framework for the accurate analysis of a surveyed area. The proposed approach employs extinction profiles (EPs) extracted with extinction filters computed on both hyperspectral and LIDAR images, leading to a fusion of the spectral, spatial, and elevation features. Experimental results obtained by using a real hyperspectral image along with LIDAR-derived digital surface model (DSM) collected over the University of Houston campus and its neighboring urban area demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Integration of Ant Colony Optimization and Object-Based Analysis for LiDAR Data Classification

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data classification provides useful thematic maps for numerous geospatial applications. Several methods and algorithms have been proposed recently for LiDAR data classification. Most studies focused on object-based analysis because of its advantages over per-pixel-based methods. However, several issues, such as parameter optimization, attribute selection, and development of transferable rulesets, remain challenging in this topic. This study contributes to LiDAR data classification by developing an approach that integrates ant colony optimization (ACO) and rule-based classification. First, LiDAR-derived digital elevation and digital surface models were integrated with high-resolution orthophotos. Second, the processed raster was segmented with the multiresolution segmentation method. Subsequently, the parameters were optimized with a supervised technique based on fuzzy analysis. A total of 20 attributes were selected based on general knowledge on the study area and LiDAR data; the best subset containing 12 attributes was then selected via ACO. These attributes were utilized to develop rulesets through the use of a decision tree algorithm, and a thematic map was generated for the study area. Results revealed the robustness of the proposed method, which has an overall accuracy of ∼95% and a kappa coefficient of 0.94. The rule-based approach with all attributes and the k nearest neighbor (KNN) classification method were applied to validate the results of the proposed method. The overall accuracy of the rule-based method with all attributes was ∼88% (kappa = 0.82), whereas the KNN method had an overall accuracy of <70% and produced a poor thematic map. The selection of the ACO algorithm was justified through a comparison with three well-known feature selection methods. On the other hand, the transferability of the developed rules was evaluated by using a second LiDAR dataset at another study area. The overall accuracy and the kappa index for the second study area were 92% and 0.90, respectively. Overall, the findings indicate that the selection of a subset with significant attributes is important for accurate LiDAR data classification with object-based methods.

Fusion of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Remote Sensing Data Using Multiple Feature Learning

Hyperspectral image classification has been an active topic of research. In recent years, it has been found that light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data provide a source of complementary information that can greatly assist in the classification of hyperspectral data, in particular when it is difficult to separate complex classes. This is because, in addition to the spatial and the spectral information provided by hyperspectral data, LiDAR can provide very valuable information about the height of the surveyed area that can help with the discrimination of classes and their separability. In the past, several efforts have been investigated for fusion of hyperspectral and LiDAR data, with some efforts driven by the morphological information that can be derived from both data sources. However, a main challenge for the learning approaches is how to exploit the information coming from multiple features. Specifically, it has been found that simple concatenation or stacking of features such as morphological attribute profiles (APs) may contain redundant information. In addition, a significant increase in the number of features may lead to very high-dimensional input features. This is in contrast with the limited number of training samples often available in remote-sensing applications, which may lead to the Hughes effect. In this work, we develop a new efficient strategy for fusion and classification of hyperspectral and LiDAR data. Our approach has been designed to integrate multiple types of features extracted from these data. An important characteristic of the presented approach is that it does not require any regularization parameters, so that different types of features can be efficiently exploited and integrated in a collaborative and flexible way. Our experimental results, conducted using a hyperspectral image and a LiDAR-derived digital surface model (DSM) collected over the University of Houston campus and the neighboring urban area, indicate that the proposed framework for multiple feature learning provides state-of-the-art classification results.

Feature grouping-based multiple fuzzy classifier system for fusion of hyperspectral and LIDAR data

Interest in the joint use of different data from multiple sensors has been increased for classification applications. This is because the fusion of different information can produce a better understanding of the observed site. In this field of study, the fusion of light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and passive optical remote sensing data for classification of land cover has attracted much attention. This paper addressed the use of a combination of hyperspectral (HS) and LIDAR data for land cover classification. HS images provide a detailed description of the spectral signatures of classes, whereas LIDAR data give detailed information about the height but no information for the spectral signatures. This paper presents a multiple fuzzy classifier system for fusion of HS and LIDAR data. The system is based on the fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classification of two data sets after application of feature grouping on them. Then a fuzzy decision fusion method is applied to fuse the results of fuzzy KNN classifiers. An experiment was carried out on the classification of HS and LIDAR data from Houston, USA. The proposed fuzzy classifier ensemble system for HS and LIDAR data provide interesting conclusions on the effectiveness and potentials of the joint use of these two data. Fuzzy classifier fusion on these two data sets improves the classification results when compared with independent single fuzzy classifiers on each data set. The fuzzy proposed method represented the best accuracy with a gain in overall accuracy of 93%.

K-Plane-Based Classification of Airborne LiDAR Data for Accurate Building Roof Measurement

A new classification method based on the k-plane clustering algorithm is proposed to segment the point cloud of a building roof, which is obtained from an airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) instrument. In the operation of laser points clustering, 3-D coordinates of laser points in the point cloud are directly used as clustering objects. Fitting planes of laser points in the clusters are generated from the obtained clustering solution, and intersecting lines of the fitting planes are calculated. Using the intersecting lines, the point cloud of the building roof is then segmented. Since calculation for the clustering objects, i.e., the normal vectors of neighboring planes of the laser points, required in the classification methods based on the fuzzy k-means clustering algorithm is avoided in the proposed method, not only is the complexity of the classification procedure reduced, but also the accuracy of classification result is improved. In addition, in the proposed method, to guarantee the effectiveness of the k-plane algorithm, the initial cluster planes are estimated from the elevation image of building roof in advance before the process of clustering operation. The proposed k-plane-based classification method is validated by using a number of real airborne LiDAR point clouds.

A New Approach to 3D Dense LiDAR Data Classification in Urban Environment

Classification of Mobile Mapping LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data is a challenge in the research community since the day when laser scanner system were integrated and mounted on vehicles for collection of 3D data in urban environment. The approach proposed here for classifying LiDAR data is analogous to the process followed for classifying data from satellite images. Pixel based and segmentation based methods have been employed in past for classifying images obtained from satellites. These methods were based on spectral properties of objects present in the images. But for Mobile mapping LiDAR data this approach has been applied and tested for the first time. The properties of this data are completely different from that of satellite images. So even if the basic approach remains the same, many changes have to be made in the entire classification process. The paper here aims to propose the basic procedure of using pixel-wise classification on dense 3D LiDAR data.

Automatic Extraction of 3D Objects from LiDAR Data

Aerial topographic surveys using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology collect dense and accurate information from the surface or terrain, it is becoming one of the important tools in the geosciences for studying earth surface. Classification of LiDAR data for the purpose of extracting ground, vegetation, and buildings is a very important step needed in numerous applications such as 3D city modelling, remote sensing, geographical information system (GIS), mapping, navigation, etc... Regardless of what the scan data will be used for, anautomatic process is greatly required to handle the immense amounts of data collected because the manual process is long and expensive. This paper presents an approach for automatic classification of aerial LiDAR data into 5 groups– buildings, trees, roads, linear object and soil using single return LIDAR and processing the point cloud without generating DEM. Topological relationship and height variation analysis is adopted to segment the entire point cloud preliminarily into upper contour, lower contour, uniform surface, non-uniform surface, linear objects, and the rest. This primary classification is used on the one hand to know the upper and lower of each building in urban scene needed to model facade building and on the second hand to extract point cloud of uniform surface which contain roof, road and ground used in the second phase of classification. The second algorithm is developed to segment the uniform surface into roof building, road and ground, the second phase of classification based on the topological relationship and height variation analysis, The proposed approach has been tested using two areas the first is a housing complex and the second is a primary school. The proposed approach follows in this study proves successful classification results of buildings, vegetation and road classes.

Complete classification of raw LIDAR data and 3D reconstruction of buildings

LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) data are a primary data source for digital terrain model (DTM) generation and 3D city models. This paper presents a three-stage framework for a robust automatic classification of raw LIDAR data as buildings, ground and vegetation, followed by a reconstruction of 3D models of the buildings. In the first stage the raw data are filtered and interpolated over a grid. In the second stage, first a double raw data segmentation is performed and then geometric and topological relationships among regions resulting from segmentation are computed and stored in a knowledge base. In the third stage, a rule-based scheme is applied for the classification of the regions. Finally, polyhedral building models are reconstructed by analysing the topology of building outlines, building roof slopes and eaves lines. Results obtained on data sets with different ground point density, gathered over the town of Pavia (Italy) with Toposys and Optech airborne laser scanning systems, are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.