Automatic Removal of Imperfections and Change Detection for Accurate 3D Urban Cartography by Classification and Incremental Updating

In this article, we present a new method of automatic 3D urban cartography in which different imperfections are progressively removed by incremental updating, exploiting the concept of multiple passages, using specialized functions. In the proposed method, the 3D point clouds are first classified into three main object classes: permanently static, temporarily static and mobile, using a new point matching technique. The temporarily static and mobile objects are then removed from the 3D point clouds, leaving behind a perforated 3D point cloud of the urban scene. These perforated 3D point clouds obtained from successive passages (in the same place) on different days and at different times are then matched together to complete the 3D urban landscape. The changes occurring in the urban landscape over this period of time are detected and analyzed using cognitive functions of similarity, and the resulting 3D cartography is progressively modified accordingly. The specialized functions introduced help to remove the different imperfections, due to occlusions, misclassifications and different changes occurring in the environment over time, thus ncreasing the robustness of the method. The results, evaluated on real data, demonstrate that not only is the resulting 3D cartography accurate, containing only the exact permanent features free from imperfections, but the method is also suitable for handling large urban scenes. Remote Sens. 2013, 5 3702