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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-B2-2026-231-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>LiDAR Point Cloud Oversegmentation via SAM-based Knowledge Distillation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Lu</surname>
<given-names>Dening</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>Chapman</surname>
<given-names>Michael A.</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>Li</surname>
<given-names>Jonathan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Dept. of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Dept. of Civil Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Dept. of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada</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>231</fpage>
<lpage>237</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Dening Lu 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-B2-2026/231/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-231-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/231/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-231-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/231/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-231-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/231/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-231-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Large-scale LiDAR point clouds provide rich geometric information, yet learning effective structural representations remains challenging due to the misalignment between semantic categories and geometric structures. To address this issue, we propose a SAM-guided framework for point cloud oversegmentation. We transfer grouping knowledge from 2D vision by constructing a large-scale oversegmentation dataset using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) on bird&amp;rsquo;s-eye-view projections. Based on these grouping priors, a structure-aware point cloud encoder is learned via a distillation objective that enforces intra-region compactness and inter-region separation in the embedding space. The proposed approach does not rely on semantic supervision and directly learns generalizable structural representations. Experiments on various benchmark datasets (STPLS3D, Toronto-3D, DALES, and S3DIS) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance. In particular, it significantly improves boundary recall (e.g., 92.21% on STPLS3D and 93.47% on Toronto-3D) while maintaining high oracle accuracy (up to 97.62%). Moreover, the model generalizes well to unseen datasets without retraining, showing strong cross-dataset inference capability.</p>
</abstract>
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