LiDAR Point Cloud Classification by 3D Sparse CNN for large-scale Mobile Laser Scanning

Nan Li, H. Teufelsbauer, Florian Pöppl, Andreas Ullrich

Abstract. Semantic classification is a fundamental step in Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds processing, and remains a non-trivial task. In this work, we propose a classification framework based on a 3D Sparse Convolutional Neural Network (SparseCNN) for efficient processing of large-scale MLS data. A coarse-to-fine two-stage pipeline is introduced, where an essential model performs a classification for the entire scene, followed by a refinement stage for detailed ground-surface classes. To enhance robustness under diverse acquisition conditions, both point-wise and scene-wise data augmentation strategies are employed during the training, including rotation, jittering, density perturbation, noise injection, and patch swapping. To account for environmental and sensor variations, wavelength-specific models are trained for both urban and highway scenes. Experimental results on urban and highway datasets demonstrate strong performance, achieving over 90% accuracy for major classes, while ablation studies show that radiometric features are critical for distinguishing material dependent classes, such as traffic signs, and that the proposed augmentation strategies improve performance for challenging object categories, such as pedestrian, which is dynamic and structurally ambiguous.