# Ground Awareness in Deep Learning for Large Outdoor Point Cloud Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18246/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07563/) (2017)
- [Toronto-3D: A Large-scale Mobile LiDAR Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Roadways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08284/) (2020)
- [Beyond RGB: Very High Resolution Urban Remote Sensing With Multimodal Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08681/) (2017)
- [The Hessigheim 3D (H3D) Benchmark on Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution 3D Point Clouds and Textured Meshes from UAV LiDAR and Multi-View-Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05346/) (2021)
- [Semantic Segmentation on Swiss3DCities: A Benchmark Study on Aerial Photogrammetric 3D Pointcloud Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12996/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents an analysis of utilizing elevation data to aid outdoor point cloud semantic segmentation through existing machine-learning networks in remote sensing, specifically in urban, built-up areas. In dense outdoor point clouds, the receptive field of a machine learning model may be too small to accurately determine the surroundings and context of a point. By computing Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) from the point clouds, we extract the relative elevation feature, which is the vertical distance from the terrain to a point. RandLA-Net is employed for efficient semantic segmentation of large-scale point clouds. We assess its performance across three diverse outdoor datasets captured with varying sensor technologies and sensor locations. Integration of relative elevation data leads to consistent performance improvements across all three datasets, most notably in the Hessigheim dataset, with an increase of 3.7 percentage points in average F1 score from 72.35% to 76.01%, by establishing long-range dependencies between ground and objects. We also explore additional local features such as planarity, normal vectors, and 2D features, but their efficacy varied based on the characteristics of the point cloud. Ultimately, this study underscores the important role of the non-local relative elevation feature for semantic segmentation of point clouds in remote sensing applications.