Point cloud segmentation towards urban ground modeling

This paper presents a new method for segmentation and interpretation of 3D point clouds from mobile LIDAR data. The main contribution of this work is the automatic detection and classification of artifacts located at the ground level. The detection is based on Top-Hat of hole filling algorithm of range images. Then, several features are extracted from the detected connected components (CCs). Afterward, a stepwise forward variable selection by using Wilk's Lambda criterion is performed. Finally, CCs are classified in four categories (lampposts, pedestrians, cars, the others) by using a SVM machine learning method.