Unsupervised deep learning for semantic segmentation of multispectral LiDAR forest point clouds

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Hauptverfasser: Ruoppa, Lassi, Oinonen, Oona, Taher, Josef, Lehtomäki, Matti, Takhtkeshha, Narges, Kukko, Antero, Kaartinen, Harri, Hyyppä, Juha
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ruoppa, Lassi
Oinonen, Oona
Taher, Josef
Lehtomäki, Matti
Takhtkeshha, Narges
Kukko, Antero
Kaartinen, Harri
Hyyppä, Juha
author_facet Ruoppa, Lassi
Oinonen, Oona
Taher, Josef
Lehtomäki, Matti
Takhtkeshha, Narges
Kukko, Antero
Kaartinen, Harri
Hyyppä, Juha
contents Point clouds captured with laser scanning systems from forest environments can be utilized in a wide variety of applications within forestry and plant ecology, such as the estimation of tree stem attributes, leaf angle distribution, and above-ground biomass. However, effectively utilizing the data in such tasks requires the semantic segmentation of the data into wood and foliage points, also known as leaf-wood separation. The traditional approach to leaf-wood separation has been geometry- and radiometry-based unsupervised algorithms, which tend to perform poorly on data captured with airborne laser scanning (ALS) systems, even with a high point density. While recent machine and deep learning approaches achieve great results even on sparse point clouds, they require manually labeled training data, which is often extremely laborious to produce. Multispectral (MS) information has been demonstrated to have potential for improving the accuracy of leaf-wood separation, but quantitative assessment of its effects has been lacking. This study proposes a fully unsupervised deep learning method, GrowSP-ForMS, which is specifically designed for leaf-wood separation of high-density MS ALS point clouds and based on the GrowSP architecture. GrowSP-ForMS achieved a mean accuracy of 84.3% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 69.6% on our MS test set, outperforming the unsupervised reference methods by a significant margin. When compared to supervised deep learning methods, our model performed similarly to the slightly older PointNet architecture but was outclassed by more recent approaches. Finally, two ablation studies were conducted, which demonstrated that our proposed changes increased the test set mIoU of GrowSP-ForMS by 29.4 percentage points (pp) in comparison to the original GrowSP model and that utilizing MS data improved the mIoU by 5.6 pp from the monospectral case.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised deep learning for semantic segmentation of multispectral LiDAR forest point clouds
Ruoppa, Lassi
Oinonen, Oona
Taher, Josef
Lehtomäki, Matti
Takhtkeshha, Narges
Kukko, Antero
Kaartinen, Harri
Hyyppä, Juha
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Point clouds captured with laser scanning systems from forest environments can be utilized in a wide variety of applications within forestry and plant ecology, such as the estimation of tree stem attributes, leaf angle distribution, and above-ground biomass. However, effectively utilizing the data in such tasks requires the semantic segmentation of the data into wood and foliage points, also known as leaf-wood separation. The traditional approach to leaf-wood separation has been geometry- and radiometry-based unsupervised algorithms, which tend to perform poorly on data captured with airborne laser scanning (ALS) systems, even with a high point density. While recent machine and deep learning approaches achieve great results even on sparse point clouds, they require manually labeled training data, which is often extremely laborious to produce. Multispectral (MS) information has been demonstrated to have potential for improving the accuracy of leaf-wood separation, but quantitative assessment of its effects has been lacking. This study proposes a fully unsupervised deep learning method, GrowSP-ForMS, which is specifically designed for leaf-wood separation of high-density MS ALS point clouds and based on the GrowSP architecture. GrowSP-ForMS achieved a mean accuracy of 84.3% and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 69.6% on our MS test set, outperforming the unsupervised reference methods by a significant margin. When compared to supervised deep learning methods, our model performed similarly to the slightly older PointNet architecture but was outclassed by more recent approaches. Finally, two ablation studies were conducted, which demonstrated that our proposed changes increased the test set mIoU of GrowSP-ForMS by 29.4 percentage points (pp) in comparison to the original GrowSP model and that utilizing MS data improved the mIoU by 5.6 pp from the monospectral case.
title Unsupervised deep learning for semantic segmentation of multispectral LiDAR forest point clouds
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06227