Object classification is one of the many holy grails in computer vision and as such has resulted in a very large number of algorithms being proposed already. Specifically in recent years there has been considerable progress in this area primarily due to the increased efficiency and accessibility of deep learning techniques. In fact, for single-label object classification [i.e. only one object present in the image] the state-of-the-art techniques employ deep neural networks and are reporting very close to human-like performance. There are specialized applications in which single-label object-level classification will not suffice; for example in cases where the image contains multiple intertwined objects of different labels. In this paper, we address the complex problem of multi-label pixelwise classification. We present our distinct solution based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for performing multi-label pixelwise classification and its application to large-scale urban reconstruction. A supervised learning approach is followed for training a 13-layer CNN using both LiDAR and satellite images. An empirical study has been conducted to determine the hyperparameters which result in the optimal performance of the CNN. Scale invariance is introduced by training the network on five different scales of the input and labeled data. This results in six pixelwise classifications for each different scale. An SVM is then trained to map the six pixelwise classifications into a single-label. Lastly, we refine boundary pixel labels using graph-cuts for maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation with Markov Random Field (MRF) priors. The resulting pixelwise classification is then used to accurately extract and reconstruct the buildings in large-scale urban areas. The proposed approach has been extensively tested and the results are reported.
The state-of-the-art in urban reconstruction can be better categorized according to the type and scale of the input data. For a comprehensive survey of urban reconstruction of various types and scales we refer the reader to the survey by @cite_7 . In this section, we provide a brief overview of state-of-the-art in large-scale urban reconstruction from remote sensor data, most relevant to our work.
@cite_7
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This paper provides a comprehensive overview of urban reconstruction. While there exists a considerable body of literature, this topic is still under active research. The work reviewed in this survey stems from the following three research communities: computer graphics, computer vision and photogrammetry and remote sensing. Our goal is to provide a survey that will help researchers to better position their own work in the context of existing solutions, and to help newcomers and practitioners in computer graphics to quickly gain an overview of this vast field. Further, we would like to bring the mentioned research communities to even more interdisciplinary work, since the reconstruction problem itself is by far not solved. One of the potentially effective means for large-scale 3D scene reconstruction is to reconstruct the scene in a global manner, rather than incrementally, by fully exploiting available auxiliary information on the imaging condition, such as camera location by Global Positioning System (GPS), orientation by inertial measurement unit (or compass), focal length from EXIF, and so on. However, such auxiliary information, though informative and valuable, is usually too noisy to be directly usable. In this paper, we present an approach by taking advantage of such noisy auxiliary information to improve structure from motion solving. More specifically, we introduce two effective iterative global optimization algorithms initiated with such noisy auxiliary information. One is a robust rotation averaging algorithm to deal with contaminated epipolar graph, the other is a robust scene reconstruction algorithm to deal with noisy GPS data for camera centers initialization. We found that by exclusively focusing on the estimated inliers at the current iteration, the optimization process initialized by such noisy auxiliary information could converge well and efficiently. Our proposed method is evaluated on real images captured by unmanned aerial vehicle, StreetView car, and conventional digital cameras. Extensive experimental results show that our method performs similarly or better than many of the state-of-art reconstruction approaches, in terms of reconstruction accuracy and completeness, but is more efficient and scalable for large-scale image data sets. Urban reconstruction from a video captured by a surveying vehicle constitutes a core module of automated mapping. When computational power represents a limited resource and, a detailed map is not the primary goal, the reconstruction can be performed incrementally, from a monocular video, carving a 3D Delaunay triangulation of sparse points; this allows online incremental mapping for tasks such as traversability analysis or obstacle avoidance. To exploit the sharp edges of urban landscape, we propose to use a Delaunay triangulation of Edge-Points, which are the 3D points corresponding to image edges. These points constrain the edges of the 3D Delaunay triangulation to real-world edges. Besides the use of the Edge-Points, a second contribution of this paper is the Inverse Cone Heuristic that preemptively avoids the creation of artifacts in the reconstructed manifold surface. We force the reconstruction of a manifold surface since it makes it possible to apply computer graphics or photometric refinement algorithms to the output mesh. We evaluated our approach on four real sequences of the public available KITTI dataset by comparing the incremental reconstruction against Velodyne measurements. Real-time or online 3D reconstruction has wide applicability and receives further interest due to availability of consumer depth cameras. Typical approaches use a moving sensor to accumulate depth measurements into a single model which is continuously refined. Designing such systems is an intricate balance between reconstruction quality, speed, spatial scale, and scene assumptions. Existing online methods either trade scale to achieve higher quality reconstructions of small objects scenes. Or handle larger scenes by trading real-time performance and or quality, or by limiting the bounds of the active reconstruction. Additionally, many systems assume a static scene, and cannot robustly handle scene motion or reconstructions that evolve to reflect scene changes. We address these limitations with a new system for real-time dense reconstruction with equivalent quality to existing online methods, but with support for additional spatial scale and robustness in dynamic scenes. Our system is designed around a simple and flat point-Based representation, which directly works with the input acquired from range depth sensors, without the overhead of converting between representations. The use of points enables speed and memory efficiency, directly leveraging the standard graphics pipeline for all central operations, i.e., camera pose estimation, data association, outlier removal, fusion of depth maps into a single denoised model, and detection and update of dynamic objects. We conclude with qualitative and quantitative results that highlight robust tracking and high quality reconstructions of a diverse set of scenes at varying scales.