Semantic Segmentation of Natural Materials on a Point Cloud Using Spatial and Multispectral Features.

The characterization of natural spaces by the precise observation of their material properties is highly demanded in remote sensing and computer vision. The production of novel sensors enables the collection of heterogeneous data to get a comprehensive knowledge of the living and non-living entities...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Jurado Rodríguez, Juan Manuel, Cárdenas Donoso, José Luís, Ogayas Anguita, Carlos Javier, Ortega Alvarado, Lidia María, Feito Higueruela, Francisco Ramón
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2020
Country:España
Institution:Ajuntament de Barcelona
Repository:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:ruja________::0164d3257b52ea560c7d21e6f621f117
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/8/2244
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/7930
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:multispectral imaging
heterogeneous data fusion
point cloud segmentation
material-based recognition
1203.04, 2505.02, 1203.99, 2414.99
Description
Summary:The characterization of natural spaces by the precise observation of their material properties is highly demanded in remote sensing and computer vision. The production of novel sensors enables the collection of heterogeneous data to get a comprehensive knowledge of the living and non-living entities in the ecosystem. The high resolution of consumer-grade RGB cameras is frequently used for the geometric reconstruction of many types of environments. Nevertheless, the understanding of natural spaces is still challenging. The automatic segmentation of homogeneous materials in nature is a complex task because there are many overlapping structures and an indirect illumination, so the object recognition is difficult. In this paper, we propose a method based on fusing spatial and multispectral characteristics for the unsupervised classification of natural materials in a point cloud. A high-resolution camera and a multispectral sensor are mounted on a custom camera rig in order to simultaneously capture RGB and multispectral images. Our method is tested in a controlled scenario, where different natural objects coexist. Initially, the input RGB images are processed to generate a point cloud by applying the structure-from-motion (SfM) algorithm. Then, the multispectral images are mapped on the three-dimensional model to characterize the geometry with the reflectance captured from four narrow bands (green, red, red-edge and near-infrared). The reflectance, the visible colour and the spatial component are combined to extract key differences among all existing materials. For this purpose, a hierarchical cluster analysis is applied to pool the point cloud and identify the feature pattern for every material. As a result, the tree trunk, the leaves, different species of low plants, the ground and rocks can be clearly recognized in the scene. These results demonstrate the feasibility to perform a semantic segmentation by considering multispectral and spatial features with an unknown number of clusters to be detected on the point cloud. Moreover, our solution is compared to other method based on supervised learning in order to test the improvement of the proposed approach.