ON THE ASSOCIATION OF LIDAR POINT CLOUDS AND TEXTURED MESHES FOR MULTI-MODAL SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION

Abstract. The semantic segmentation of the huge amount of acquired 3D data has become an important task in recent years. We propose a novel association mechanism that enables information transfer between two 3D representations: point clouds and meshes. The association mechanism can be used in a two-fold manner: (i) feature transfer to stabilize semantic segmentation of one representation with features from the other representation and (ii) label transfer to achieve the semantic annotation of both representations. We claim that point clouds are an intermediate product whereas meshes are a final user product that jointly provides geometrical and textural information. For this reason, we opt for semantic mesh segmentation in the first place. We apply an off-the-shelf PointNet++ to a textured urban triangle mesh as generated from LiDAR and oblique imagery. For each face within a mesh, a feature vector is computed and optionally extended by inherent LiDAR features as provided by the sensor (e.g. intensity). The feature vector extension is accomplished with the proposed association mechanism. By these means, we leverage inherent features from both data representations for the semantic mesh segmentation (multi-modality). We achieve an overall accuracy of 86:40% on the face-level on a dedicated test mesh. Neglecting LiDAR-inherent features in the per-face feature vectors decreases mean intersection over union by ∼2%. Leveraging our association mechanism, we transfer predicted mesh labels to the LiDAR point cloud at a stroke. To this end, we semantically segment the point cloud by implicit usage of geometric and textural mesh features. The semantic point cloud segmentation achieves an overall accuracy close to 84% on the point-level for both feature vector compositions.