Accurate Rock-Mass Extraction From Terrestrial Laser Point Clouds via Multiscale and Multiview Convolutional Feature Representation

Existing 3-D object extraction methods on terrestrial laser point clouds are further developed through filtering and labeling. However, such predefined features are heuristically designed to process generic object point clouds. Thus, existing abilities are insufficient to handle specific rock-mass point clouds. Given the complexity and diversity of terrestrial environments, the effective removal of vegetation points from rock-mass point clouds is particularly challenging. To address such problems, this study presents a novel approach for 3-D rock-mass point clouds labeling by using convolutional feature learning based on distribution priors with multiple scales and views. First, to extract discriminative features of each point for classification, we propose novel multiview supporting planes to analyze the spatial distribution and structure of its neighboring points for each category. Second, we define the multiscale spatial distribution matrix on a grid representation (e.g., the number of points projected into each cell). Last, the statistical information of points is nonlinearly combined and hierarchically compressed to generate a compact and effective convolutional feature representation for classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated via experiments on rock-mass point clouds from different scenes. Compared with existing extraction approaches, experimental results indicate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of the precision and recall.