# A Fully Convolutional Network for Semantic Labeling of 3D Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01408 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01408/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Deep Learning-based 3D Point Cloud Classification: A Systematic Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02608/) (2023)
- [Beyond single receptive field: A receptive field fusion-and-stratification network for airborne laser scanning point cloud classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10278/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When classifying point clouds, a large amount of time is devoted to the process of engineering a reliable set of features which are then passed to a classifier of choice. Generally, such features - usually derived from the 3D-covariance matrix - are computed using the surrounding neighborhood of points. While these features capture local information, the process is usually time-consuming, and requires the application at multiple scales combined with contextual methods in order to adequately describe the diversity of objects within a scene. In this paper we present a 1D-fully convolutional network that consumes terrain-normalized points directly with the corresponding spectral data,if available, to generate point-wise labeling while implicitly learning contextual features in an end-to-end fashion. Our method uses only the 3D-coordinates and three corresponding spectral features for each point. Spectral features may either be extracted from 2D-georeferenced images, as shown here for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds, or extracted directly for passive-derived point clouds,i.e. from muliple-view imagery. We train our network by splitting the data into square regions, and use a pooling layer that respects the permutation-invariance of the input points. Evaluated using the ISPRS 3D Semantic Labeling Contest, our method scored second place with an overall accuracy of 81.6%. We ranked third place with a mean F1-score of 63.32%, surpassing the F1-score of the method with highest accuracy by 1.69%. In addition to labeling 3D-point clouds, we also show that our method can be easily extended to 2D-semantic segmentation tasks, with promising initial results.