ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Citation
Articles | Volume II-5/W2
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprsannals-II-5-W2-331-2013
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprsannals-II-5-W2-331-2013
16 Oct 2013
 | 16 Oct 2013

Change Detection in 3D Point Clouds Acquired by a Mobile Mapping System

W. Xiao, B. Vallet, and N. Paparoditis

Keywords: 3D, occupancy, Dempster–Shafer theory, change detection, mobile laser scanning, point cloud

Abstract. Thanks to the development of Mobile mapping systems (MMS), street object recognition, classification, modelling and related studies have become hot topics recently. There has been increasing interest in detecting changes between mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds in complex urban areas. A method based on the consistency between the occupancies of space computed from different datasets is proposed. First occupancy of scan rays (empty, occupied, unknown) are defined while considering the accuracy of measurement and registration. Then the occupancy of scan rays are fused using the Weighted Dempster–Shafer theory (WDST). Finally, the consistency between different datasets is obtained by comparing the occupancy at points from one dataset with the fused occupancy of neighbouring rays from the other dataset. Change detection results are compared with a conventional point to triangle (PTT) distance method. Changes at point level are detected fully automatically. The proposed approach allows to detect changes at large scales in urban scenes with fine detail and more importantly, distinguish real changes from occlusions.