Simplified markov random fields for efficient semantic labeling of 3D point clouds

In this paper, we focus on 3D point cloud classification by assigning semantic labels to each point in the scene. We propose to use simplified Markov networks to model the contextual relations between points, where the node potentials are calculated from point-wise classification results using off-the-shelf classifiers, such as Random Forest and Support Vector Machines, and the edge potentials are set by physical distance between points. Our experimental results show that this approach yields comparable if not better results with improved speed compared with state-of-the-art methods. We also propose a novel robust neighborhood filtering method to exclude outliers in the neighborhood of points, in order to reduce noise in local geometric statistics when extracting features and also to reduce number of false edges when constructing Markov networks. We show that applying robust neighborhood filtering improves the results when classifying point clouds with more object categories.