A Hierarchical Approach for Point Cloud Classification With 3D Contextual Features

Classifying point cloud of urban landscapes plays essential roles in many urban applications. However, automating such a task is challenging due to irregular point distribution and complex urban scenes. Incorporating contextual information is crucial in improving classification accuracy of point clouds. In this article, we propose a hierarchical approach for point cloud classification with 3-D contextual features, which comprises three steps:segment-based classification with primitive features and a random forest classifier; extracting novel 3-D contextual features from the initial labels considering spatial relationships between neighboring segments and semantic dependencies; and refining classification with a combination of primitive features and spatial contextual features, and a hierarchical multilayer perceptron classifier that considers primitive features and spatial contextual features at different levels. The proposed method was tested on two point cloud datasets:the National University of Singapore (NUS) dataset and the Vaihingen benchmark dataset of the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. The evaluation results showed that the proposed method achieved an overall accuracy of 92.51% and 82.34% for the NUS dataset and Vaihingen dataset, respectively. The feature importance evaluation showed that 3-D spatial contextual features contributed useful information for discriminating different classes, such as roof, facade, grassland, tree, and ground. Quantitative comparisons further showed that the proposed method is more advantageous, especially in the detection of class roof and facade.