Lingli Zhu

Photorealistic Building Reconstruction from Mobile Laser Scanning Data

Abstract: Nowadays, advanced real-time visualization for location-based applications, such as vehicle navigation or mobile phone navigation, requires large scale 3D reconstruction of street scenes. This paper presents methods for generating photorealistic 3D city models from raw mobile laser scanning data, which only contain georeferenced XYZ coordinates of points, to enable the use of photorealistic models in a mobile phone for personal navigation. The main focus is on the automated processing algorithms for noise point filtering, ground and building point classification, detection of planar surfaces, and on the key points (e.g., corners) of building derivation. The test site is located in the Tapiola area, Espoo, Finland. It is an area of commercial buildings, including shopping centers, banks, government agencies, bookstores, and high-rise residential buildings, with the tallest building being 45 m in height. Buildings were extracted by comparing the overlaps of X and Y coordinates of the point clouds between the cutoff-boxes at different and transforming the top-view of the point clouds of each overlap into a binary image and applying standard image processing technology to remove the non-building points, and finally transforming this image back into point clouds. The purpose for using points from cutoff-boxes instead of all points for building detection is to reduce the influence of tree points close to the building facades on building extraction. This method can also be extended to transform point clouds in different views into binary images for various other object extractions. In order to ensure the building geometry completeness, manual check and correction are needed after the key points of building derivation by automated algorithms. As our goal is to obtain photorealistic 3D models for walk-through views, terrestrial images were captured and used for texturing building facades. Currently, fully

The Use of Airborne and Mobile Laser Scanning for Modeling Railway Environments in 3D

This paper presents methods for 3D modeling of railway environments from airborne laser scanning (ALS) and mobile laser scanning (MLS). Conventionally, aerial data such as ALS and aerial images were utilized for 3D model reconstruction. However, 3D model reconstruction only from aerial-view datasets can not meet the requirement of advanced visualization (e.g., walk-through visualization). In this paper, objects in a railway environment such as the ground, railroads, buildings, high voltage powerlines, pylons and so on were reconstructed and visualized in real-life experiments in Kokemaki, Finland. Because of the complex terrain and scenes in railway environments, 3D modeling is challenging, especially for high resolution walk-through visualizations. However, MLS has flexible platforms and provides the possibility of acquiring data in a complex environment in high detail by combining with ALS data to produce complete 3D scene modeling. A procedure from point cloud classification to 3D reconstruction and 3D visualization is introduced, and new solutions are proposed for object extraction, 3D reconstruction, model simplification and final model 3D visualization. Image processing technology is used for the classification, 3D randomized Hough transformations (RHT) are used for the planar detection, and a quadtree approach is used for the ground model simplification. The results are visually analyzed by a comparison with an orthophoto at a 20 cm ground resolution.

Map updating and change detection using vehicle-based laser scanning

The vehicle-based laser scanning (VLS, also known as mobile mapping) is a new technology, which is currently under development for creating 3D models of the surrounding environment. VLS is based on the integration of GPS, IMU, laser scanner and preferably digital cameras mounted on top of a moving platform, i.e. a car in most applications. VLS is a logical development after the first operative Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS) in 1994 and Terrestrial Laser Scanners mounted on top of a tripod. The data/image processing of VLS are mainly based on modifications of the methods created for ALS and TLS taking into account the differences of VLS compared to ALS and TLS. Compared to ALS, the geometry of VLS scanning is different and the pulse density varies as function of range. Two main differences between stationary TLS and constantly moving VLS are the evenness of the data and the perspective. In VLS, the point cloud is evenly distributed along the driving direction, and the viewing direction to the target remains constant. In the stop-and-go mode, the data characteristics of the VLS and conventional TLS are similar. A reasonable amount of research has been done to develop methods for single-time VLS processing, but there have not been any attempts to our knowledge of multitemporal processing of VLS data. In this paper, the high potential of change detection based on multitemporal VLS point clouds was demonstrated. Example cases include the change detection of city models and defoliation of city trees. A method to map biomass and biomass change of (city) trees was developed.

Improved Sampling for Terrestrial and Mobile Laser Scanner Point Cloud Data

We introduce and test the performance of two sampling methods that utilize distance distributions of laser point clouds in terrestrial and mobile laser scanning geometries. The methods are leveled histogram sampling and inversely weighted distance sampling. The methods aim to reduce a significant portion of the laser point cloud data while retaining most characteristics of the full point cloud. We test the methods in three case studies in which data were collected using a different terrestrial or mobile laser scanning system in each. Two reference methods, uniform sampling and linear point picking, were used for result comparison. The results demonstrate that correctly selected distance-sensitive sampling techniques allow higher point removal than the references in all the tested case studies.

International Benchmarking of the Individual Tree Detection Methods for Modeling 3-D Canopy Structure for Silviculture and Forest Ecology Using Airborne Laser Scanning

Canopy structure plays an essential role in biophysical activities in forest environments. However, quantitative descriptions of a 3-D canopy structure are extremely difficult because of the complexity and heterogeneity of forest systems. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) provides an opportunity to automatically measure a 3-D canopy structure in large areas. Compared with other point cloud technologies such as the image-based Structure from Motion, the power of ALS lies in its ability to penetrate canopies and depict subordinate trees. However, such capabilities have been poorly explored so far. In this paper, the potential of ALS-based approaches in depicting a 3-D canopy structure is explored in detail through an international benchmarking of five recently developed ALS-based individual tree detection (ITD) methods. For the first time, the results of the ITD methods are evaluated for each of four crown classes, i.e., dominant, codominant, intermediate, and suppressed trees, which provides insight toward understanding the current status of depicting a 3-D canopy structure using ITD methods, particularly with respect to their performances, potential, and challenges. This benchmarking study revealed that the canopy structure plays a considerable role in the detection accuracy of ITD methods, and its influence is even greater than that of the tree species as well as the species composition in a stand. The study also reveals the importance of utilizing the point cloud data for the detection of intermediate and suppressed trees. Different from what has been reported in previous studies, point density was found to be a highly influential factor in the performance of the methods that use point cloud data. Greater efforts should be invested in the point-based or hybrid ITD approaches to model the 3-D canopy structure and to further explore the potential of high-density and multiwavelengths ALS data.

Fully-Automated Power Line Extraction from Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds in Forest Areas

High-voltage power lines can be quite easily mapped using laser scanning data, because vegetation close to high-voltage lines is typically removed and also because the power lines are located higher off the ground in contrast to regional networks and lower voltage networks. On the contrary, lower voltage power lines are located in the middle of dense forests, and it is difficult to classify power lines in such an environment. This paper proposes an automated power line detection method for forest environments. Our method was developed based on statistical analysis and 2D image-based processing technology. During the process of statistical analysis, a set of criteria (e.g., height criteria, density criteria and histogram thresholds) is applied for selecting the candidates for power lines. After transforming the candidates to a binary image, image-based processing technology is employed. Object geometric properties are considered as criteria for power line detection. This method was conducted in six sets of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data from different forest environments. By comparison with reference data, 93.26% of power line points were correctly classified. The advantages and disadvantages of the methods were analyzed and discussed.

Comparison of the Selected State-Of-The-Art 3D Indoor Scanning and Point Cloud Generation Methods

Accurate three-dimensional (3D) data from indoor spaces are of high importance for various applications in construction, indoor navigation and real estate management. Mobile scanning techniques are offering an efficient way to produce point clouds, but with a lower accuracy than the traditional terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). In this paper, we first tackle the problem of how the quality of a point cloud should be rigorously evaluated. Previous evaluations typically operate on some point cloud subset, using a manually-given length scale, which would perhaps describe the ranging precision or the properties of the environment. Instead, the metrics that we propose perform the quality evaluation to the full point cloud and over all of the length scales, revealing the method precision along with some possible problems related to the point clouds, such as outliers, over-completeness and misregistration. The proposed methods are used to evaluate the end product point clouds of some of the latest methods. In detail, point clouds are obtained from five commercial indoor mapping systems, Matterport, NavVis, Zebedee, Stencil and Leica Pegasus: Backpack, and three research prototypes, Aalto VILMA , FGI Slammer and the Wurzburg backpack. These are compared against survey-grade TLS point clouds captured from three distinct test sites that each have different properties. Based on the presented experimental findings, we discuss the properties of the proposed metrics and the strengths and weaknesses of the above mapping systems and then suggest directions for future research.

Automated 3D Scene Reconstruction from Open Geospatial Data Sources: Airborne Laser Scanning and a 2D Topographic Database

Open geospatial data sources provide opportunities for low cost 3D scene reconstruction. In this study, based on a sparse airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud (0.8 points/m2) obtained from open source databases, a building reconstruction pipeline for CAD building models was developed. The pipeline includes voxel-based roof patch segmentation, extraction of the key-points representing the roof patch outline, step edge identification and adjustment, and CAD building model generation. The advantages of our method lie in generating CAD building models without the step of enforcing the edges to be parallel or building regularization. Furthermore, although it has been challenging to use sparse datasets for 3D building reconstruction, our result demonstrates the great potential in such applications. In this paper, we also investigated the applicability of open geospatial datasets for 3D road detection and reconstruction. Road central lines were acquired from an open source 2D topographic database. ALS data were utilized to obtain the height and width of the road. A constrained search method (CSM) was developed for road width detection. The CSM method was conducted by splitting a given road into patches according to height and direction criteria. The road edges were detected patch by patch. The road width was determined by the average distance from the edge points to the central line. As a result, 3D roads were reconstructed from ALS and a topographic database.

An Integrated GNSS/INS/LiDAR-SLAM Positioning Method for Highly Accurate Forest Stem Mapping

Forest mapping, one of the main components of performing a forest inventory, is an important driving force in the development of laser scanning. Mobile laser scanning (MLS), in which laser scanners are installed on moving platforms, has been studied as a convenient measurement method for forest mapping in the past several years. Positioning and attitude accuracies are important for forest mapping using MLS systems. Inertial Navigation Systems (INSs) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) are typical and popular positioning and attitude sensors used in MLS systems. In forest environments, because of the loss of signal due to occlusion and severe multipath effects, the positioning accuracy of GNSS is severely degraded, and even that of GNSS/INS decreases considerably. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) can achieve higher positioning accuracy in environments containing many features and is commonly implemented in GNSS-denied indoor environments. Forests are different from an indoor environment in that the GNSS signal is available to some extent in a forest. Although the positioning accuracy of GNSS/INS is reduced, estimates of heading angle and velocity can maintain high accurate even with fewer satellites. GNSS/INS and the LiDAR-based SLAM technique can be effectively integrated to form a sustainable, highly accurate positioning and mapping solution for use in forests without additional hardware costs. In this study, information such as heading angles and velocities extracted from a GNSS/INS is utilized to improve the positioning accuracy of the SLAM solution, and two information-aided SLAM methods are proposed. First, a heading angle-aided SLAM (H-aided SLAM) method is proposed that supplies the heading angle from GNSS/INS to SLAM. Field test results show that the horizontal positioning accuracy of an entire trajectory of 800 m is 0.13 m and is significantly improved (by 70%) compared to that of a traditional GNSS/INS; second, a more complex information added SLAM solution that utilizes both heading angle and velocity information simultaneously (HV-aided SLAM) is investigated. Experimental results show that the horizontal positioning accuracy can reach a level of six centimetres with the HV-aided SLAM, which is a significant improvement (by 86%). Thus, a more accurate forest map is obtained by the proposed integrated method.

3D city model for mobile phone using MMS data

Recently, research towards using 3D city models for personal navigation has been rapidly increasing. In this paper, an approach for 3D city model reconstruction for the application of mobile phone-based navigation is presented, which is based on data collected from vehicle-based mobile mapping system (MMS). Our method is performed based on three objectives: small model size, perfect accuracy control as well as good visual effect. Small model size is achieved by simplified object geometry and reduced texture resolution. Model accuracy is controlled by extracting building outlines from classified point cloud and overlapping with final 3D model. Model completeness is checked by comparing resulting model with original images. Good visual effect is realized by applying photo-realistic texture. Photorealistic texture provides rich information for the reconstructed 3D scene. By applying this approach, in test area, 3D city model is successfully reconstructed.