A New Framework For Interactive Segmentation of Point Clouds

Abstract. Point cloud segmentation is a fundamental problem in point processing. Segmenting a point cloud fully automatically is very challenging due to the property of point cloud as well as different requirements of distinct users. In this paper, an interactive segmentation method for point clouds is proposed. Only two strokes need to be drawn intuitively to indicate the target object and the background respectively. The draw strokes are sparse and don't necessarily cover the whole object. Given the strokes, a weighted graph is built and the segmentation is formulated as a minimization problem. The problem is solved efficiently by using the Max Flow Min Cut algorithm. In the experiments, the mobile mapping data of a city area is utilized. The resulting segmentations demonstrate the efficiency of the method that can be potentially applied for general point clouds.