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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-215-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>LiDAR Point Cloud Classification by 3D Sparse CNN for large-scale Mobile Laser Scanning</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Nan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Teufelsbauer</surname>
<given-names>Harald</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pöppl</surname>
<given-names>Florian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ullrich</surname>
<given-names>Andreas</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>RIEGL Research &amp; Defense GmbH, 3580 Horn, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, 3580 Horn, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>23</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B2-2026</volume>
<fpage>215</fpage>
<lpage>222</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Nan Li et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/215/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-215-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/215/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-215-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/215/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-215-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/215/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-215-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Semantic classification is a fundamental step in Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds processing, and remains a non-trivial task. In this work, we propose a classification framework based on a 3D Sparse Convolutional Neural Network (SparseCNN) for efficient processing of large-scale MLS data. A coarse-to-fine two-stage pipeline is introduced, where an essential model performs a classification for the entire scene, followed by a refinement stage for detailed ground-surface classes. To enhance robustness under diverse acquisition conditions, both point-wise and scene-wise data augmentation strategies are employed during the training, including rotation, jittering, density perturbation, noise injection, and patch swapping. To account for environmental and sensor variations, wavelength-specific models are trained for both urban and highway scenes. Experimental results on urban and highway datasets demonstrate strong performance, achieving over 90% accuracy for major classes, while ablation studies show that radiometric features are critical for distinguishing material dependent classes, such as traffic signs, and that the proposed augmentation strategies improve performance for challenging object categories, such as pedestrian, which is dynamic and structurally ambiguous.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="8"/></counts>
</article-meta>
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