Using multi-scale features for the 3D semantic labelling of airborne laser scanning data

In this paper, we present a novel framework for the semantic labeling of airborne laser scanning data on a per-point basis. Our framework uses collections of spherical and cylindrical neighborhoods for deriving a multi-scale representation for each point of the point cloud. Additionally, spatial bins are used to approximate the topography of the considered scene and thus obtain normalized heights. As the derived features are related with different units and a different range of values, they are first normalized and then provided as input to a standard Random Forest classifier. To demonstrate the performance of our framework, we present the results achieved on two commonly used benchmark datasets, namely the Vaihingen Dataset and the GML Dataset A, and we compare the results to the ones presented in related investigations. The derived results clearly reveal that our framework excells in classifying the different classes in terms of pointwise classification and thus also represents a significant achievement for a subsequent spatial regularization.