Through the Perspective of LiDAR: A Feature-Enriched and Uncertainty-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Terrestrial Point Cloud Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Fei, Chancia, Rob, Clapp, Josie, Hassanzadeh, Amirhossein, Dera, Dimah, MacKenzie, Richard, van Aardt, Jan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Fei
Chancia, Rob
Clapp, Josie
Hassanzadeh, Amirhossein
Dera, Dimah
MacKenzie, Richard
van Aardt, Jan
author_facet Zhang, Fei
Chancia, Rob
Clapp, Josie
Hassanzadeh, Amirhossein
Dera, Dimah
MacKenzie, Richard
van Aardt, Jan
contents Accurate semantic segmentation of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds is limited by costly manual annotation. We propose a semi-automated, uncertainty-aware pipeline that integrates spherical projection, feature enrichment, ensemble learning, and targeted annotation to reduce labeling effort, while sustaining high accuracy. Our approach projects 3D points to a 2D spherical grid, enriches pixels with multi-source features, and trains an ensemble of segmentation networks to produce pseudo-labels and uncertainty maps, the latter guiding annotation of ambiguous regions. The 2D outputs are back-projected to 3D, yielding densely annotated point clouds supported by a three-tier visualization suite (2D feature maps, 3D colorized point clouds, and compact virtual spheres) for rapid triage and reviewer guidance. Using this pipeline, we build Mangrove3D, a semantic segmentation TLS dataset for mangrove forests. We further evaluate data efficiency and feature importance to address two key questions: (1) how much annotated data are needed and (2) which features matter most. Results show that performance saturates after ~12 annotated scans, geometric features contribute the most, and compact nine-channel stacks capture nearly all discriminative power, with the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) plateauing at around 0.76. Finally, we confirm the generalization of our feature-enrichment strategy through cross-dataset tests on ForestSemantic and Semantic3D. Our contributions include: (i) a robust, uncertainty-aware TLS annotation pipeline with visualization tools; (ii) the Mangrove3D dataset; and (iii) empirical guidance on data efficiency and feature importance, thus enabling scalable, high-quality segmentation of TLS point clouds for ecological monitoring and beyond. The dataset and processing scripts are publicly available at https://fz-rit.github.io/through-the-lidars-eye/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06582
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Through the Perspective of LiDAR: A Feature-Enriched and Uncertainty-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Terrestrial Point Cloud Segmentation
Zhang, Fei
Chancia, Rob
Clapp, Josie
Hassanzadeh, Amirhossein
Dera, Dimah
MacKenzie, Richard
van Aardt, Jan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Accurate semantic segmentation of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds is limited by costly manual annotation. We propose a semi-automated, uncertainty-aware pipeline that integrates spherical projection, feature enrichment, ensemble learning, and targeted annotation to reduce labeling effort, while sustaining high accuracy. Our approach projects 3D points to a 2D spherical grid, enriches pixels with multi-source features, and trains an ensemble of segmentation networks to produce pseudo-labels and uncertainty maps, the latter guiding annotation of ambiguous regions. The 2D outputs are back-projected to 3D, yielding densely annotated point clouds supported by a three-tier visualization suite (2D feature maps, 3D colorized point clouds, and compact virtual spheres) for rapid triage and reviewer guidance. Using this pipeline, we build Mangrove3D, a semantic segmentation TLS dataset for mangrove forests. We further evaluate data efficiency and feature importance to address two key questions: (1) how much annotated data are needed and (2) which features matter most. Results show that performance saturates after ~12 annotated scans, geometric features contribute the most, and compact nine-channel stacks capture nearly all discriminative power, with the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) plateauing at around 0.76. Finally, we confirm the generalization of our feature-enrichment strategy through cross-dataset tests on ForestSemantic and Semantic3D. Our contributions include: (i) a robust, uncertainty-aware TLS annotation pipeline with visualization tools; (ii) the Mangrove3D dataset; and (iii) empirical guidance on data efficiency and feature importance, thus enabling scalable, high-quality segmentation of TLS point clouds for ecological monitoring and beyond. The dataset and processing scripts are publicly available at https://fz-rit.github.io/through-the-lidars-eye/.
title Through the Perspective of LiDAR: A Feature-Enriched and Uncertainty-Aware Annotation Pipeline for Terrestrial Point Cloud Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06582