A Region Based Approach to Surface Segmentation using LIDAR Data and Images

Surface segmentation aims to represent the terrain as a set of bounded and analytically defined surface patches. Many previous segmentation methods have been developed to extract planar patches from LIDAR data for building extraction. However, most of them were not fully satisfactory for more general applications in terms of the degree of automation and the quality of the segmentation results. This is mainly caused from the limited information derived from LIDAR data. The purpose of this study is thus to develop an automatic method to perform surface segmentation by combining not only LIDAR data but also images. A region-based method is proposed to generate a set of planar patches by grouping LIDAR points. The grouping criteria are based on both the coordinates of the points and the corresponding intensity values computed from the images. This method has been applied to urban data and the segmentation results are compared with the reference data acquired by manual segmentation. 76% of the test area is correctly segmented. Under-segmentation is rarely founded but over-segmentation still exists. If the over-segmentation is mitigated by merging adjacent patches with similar properties as a post-process, the proposed segmentation method can be effectively utilized for a reliable intermediate process toward automatic extraction of 3D model of the real world.