Voxel Based Segmentation of Large Airborne Topobathymetric Lidar Data

Point cloud segmentation and classification is currently a research highlight. Methods in this field create labelled data, where each point has additional class information. Current approaches are to generate a graph on the basis of all points in the point cloud, calculate or learn descriptors and train a matcher for the descriptor to the corresponding classes. Since these approaches need to look on each point in the point cloud iteratively, they result in long calculation times for large point clouds. Therefore, large point clouds need a generalization, to save computation time. One kind of generalization is to cluster the raw points into a 3D grid structure, which is represented by small volume units ( i.e. voxels) used for further processing. This paper introduces a method to use such a voxel structure to cluster a large point cloud into ground and non-ground points. The proposed method for ground detection first marks ground voxels with a region growing approach. In a second step non ground voxels are searched and filtered in the ground segment to reduce effects of over-segmentations. This filter uses the probability that a voxel mostly consist of last pulses and a discrete gradient in a local neighbourhood . The result is the ground label as a first classification result and connected segments of non-ground points. The test area of the river Mangfall in Bavaria, Germany, is used for the first processing.