Large-Scale Point Cloud Contour Extraction via 3-D-Guided Multiconditional Residual Generative Adversarial Network

As one of the most important features for human perception, contours are widely applied in graphics and mapping applications. However, it is considerably challenging to extract contours from large-scale point clouds due to the irregular distribution of point clouds. In this letter, we propose a 3-D-guided multiconditional residual generative adversarial network (3-D-GMRGAN), the first deep-learning framework to generate contours for large-scale outdoor point clouds. To make the network handle huge amounts of points, we operate contours in the parametric space rather than raw point space, associated with a parametric chamfer distance. Then, to gather contour features from potential positions and avoid the huge solution space, we propose a guided residual generative adversarial framework, by utilizing a simple feature-based method to get the “over extraction” potential contour distribution. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to generate contours efficiently for large-scale point clouds, with fewer outliers and pseudo contours compared with state-of-the-art approaches.