SEMANTIC POINT CLOUD SEGMENTATION IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS WITH 1D CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Abstract. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely recognized for their efficacy in image analysis tasks. This paper investigates the application of the 1D-CNN variant CNNs for the semantic segmentation of urban point clouds obtained through Mobile Laser Scanning. Ten well-known local geometric features of point clouds were used as input for the 1D CNN. Through an empirical analysis on the Santiago Urban Dataset, the 1D CNN was optimized in terms of numbers of convolution layers, neurons, pooling layers, dropout layers, dense layers, training epochs, and batch size. The performance of the proposed 1D CNN was compared with Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and PointNet++. Despite demonstrating a F1-score weighted at 70.3%, outperforming SVM but slightly lagging RF (71.6%) and significantly trailing PointNet++ (90.3%), the proposed 1D-CNN showcases a cost-effective potential for the segmentation of road and building classes. The relative computational requirements of the models were also discussed, highlighting the practical advantages and limitations of each approach.