Improving Urban Point Cloud Classification Using Dynamic Local Context-Based Point Confidence

Abstract. Urban mapping for planning and monitoring requires high-resolution spatial data, especially in areas with high landcover diversity. Airborne LiDAR Scanning (ALS) provides accurate 3D point cloud data, but its classification remains challenging due to computational complexity, irregular point distribution, noise, mislabeling and outliers in the dataset. These challenges are amplified in dense urban environments with mixed vegetation and infrastructure. Existing local context-based classification methods consider all points equally, overlooking the impact of their spatial position of the point in the dataset. To address this, we propose a dynamic local context-based point confidence-based optimization that improves classification accuracy by leveraging the spatial context of each point. This approach selects points based on confidence levels derived from position indices in training data and predicted by binary classifiers in test data to enhance robustness of classifier. We evaluated the proposed approach using boosting-based machine learning classifiers on two datasets: Thiruvananthapuram Aerial LiDAR Dataset (TALD) from India and the ISPRS 3D semantic labeling dataset from Vaihingen, Germany. The results showed 90.3% accuracy on TALD and 90.0% on Vaihingen, achieving a 2–4% improvement over conventional local context-based classification. Contact author first name: