ASSEMBLING AN IMAGE AND POINT CLOUD DATASET FOR HERITAGE BUILDING SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION

Abstract. Creating three-dimensional as-built models from point clouds is still a challenging task in the Cultural Heritage environment. Nowadays, performing such task typically requires the quite time-consuming manual intervention of an expert operator, in particular to deal with the complexities and peculiarities of heritage buildings. Motivated by these considerations, the development of automatic or semi-automatic tools to ease the completion of such task has recently became a very hot topic in the research community. Among the tools that can be considered to such aim, the use of deep learning methods for the semantic segmentation and classification of 2D and 3D data seems to be one of the most promising approaches. Indeed, these kinds of methods have already been successfully applied in several applications enabling scene understanding and comprehension, and, in particular, to ease the process of geometrical and informative model creation. Nevertheless, their use in the specific case of heritage buildings is still quite limited, and the already published results not completely satisfactory. The quite limited availability of dedicated benchmarks for the considered task in the heritage context can also be one of the factors for the not so satisfying results in the literature.

Hence, this paper aims at partially reducing the issues related to the limited availability of benchmarks in the heritage context by presenting a new dataset for semantic segmentation of heritage buildings. The dataset is composed by both images and point clouds of the considered buildings, in order to enable the implementation, validation and comparison of both point-based and multiview-based semantic segmentation approaches. Ground truth segmentation is provided, for both the images and point clouds related to each building, according to the class definition used in the ARCHdataset, hence potentially enabling also the integration and comparison of the results obtained on such dataset.