Abstract:
Point cloud classification of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data is essential to extract geoinformation. Although deep learning provides a new approach for...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Point cloud classification of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data is essential to extract geoinformation. Although deep learning provides a new approach for classification, the time-consuming training process and data dependence prevent its widespread application to point clouds. To solve these problems and leverage the potential of high-performing neural networks, we propose an airborne LiDAR point cloud classification method based on transfer learning. A strategy to generate feature images considering the point cloud spatial distribution is first introduced for applying traditional convolutional neural networks to point clouds. Then, transfer learning is used to extract multiscale and multiview deep features. A simple neural network classifier is designed to reduce dimensionality, fuse and learn high-level features, and postprocessing considering contextual information further improves the classification accuracy. We verified the performance of the proposed method through experiments on two airborne LiDAR data sets with different characteristics and containing eight classes. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a satisfactory classification accuracy with relatively short training time and less training samples than if using conventional methods.
Published in: IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters ( Volume: 17, Issue: 8, August 2020)