Beatriz Marcotegui

Matteo Bastico, Pierre Onghena, David Ryckelynck et al.

Accurate identification of anatomical landmarks is crucial for various medical applications. Traditional manual landmarking is time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability, while rule-based methods are often tailored to specific geometries or limited sets of landmarks. In recent years, anatomical surfaces have been effectively represented as point clouds, which are lightweight structures composed of spatial coordinates. Following this strategy and to overcome the limitations of existing landmarking techniques, we propose Landmark Point Transformer (LmPT), a method for automatic anatomical landmark detection on point clouds that can leverage homologous bones from different species for translational research. The LmPT model incorporates a conditioning mechanism that enables adaptability to different input types to conduct cross-species learning. We focus the evaluation of our approach on femoral landmarking using both human and newly annotated dog femurs, demonstrating its generalization and effectiveness across species. The code and dog femur dataset will be publicly available at: https://github.com/Pierreoo/LandmarkPointTransformer.

Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud, David Duque, Jean Pierre Richa et al.

Paris-CARLA-3D is a dataset of several dense colored point clouds of outdoor environments built by a mobile LiDAR and camera system. The data are composed of two sets with synthetic data from the open source CARLA simulator (700 million points) and real data acquired in the city of Paris (60 million points), hence the name Paris-CARLA-3D. One of the advantages of this dataset is to have simulated the same LiDAR and camera platform in the open source CARLA simulator as the one used to produce the real data. In addition, manual annotation of the classes using the semantic tags of CARLA was performed on the real data, allowing the testing of transfer methods from the synthetic to the real data. The objective of this dataset is to provide a challenging dataset to evaluate and improve methods on difficult vision tasks for the 3D mapping of outdoor environments: semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and scene completion. For each task, we describe the evaluation protocol as well as the experiments carried out to establish a baseline.

Pierre Onghena, Santiago Velasco-Forero, Beatriz Marcotegui

Point clouds are a set of data points in space to represent the 3D geometry of objects. A fundamental step in the processing is to identify a subset of points to represent the shape. While traditional sampling methods often ignore to incorporate geometrical information, recent developments in learning-based sampling models have achieved significant levels of performance. With the integration of geometrical priors, the ability to learn and preserve the underlying structure can be enhanced when sampling. To shed light into the shape, a qualitative skeleton serves as an effective descriptor to guide sampling for both local and global geometries. In this paper, we introduce MorphoSkel3D as a new technique based on morphology to facilitate an efficient skeletonization of shapes. With its low computational cost, MorphoSkel3D is a unique, rule-based algorithm to benchmark its quality and performance on two large datasets, ModelNet and ShapeNet, under different sampling ratios. The results show that training with MorphoSkel3D leads to an informed and more accurate sampling in the practical application of object classification and point cloud retrieval.

Leonardo Gigli, B Ravi Kiran, Thomas Paul et al.

Point cloud datasets for perception tasks in the context of autonomous driving often rely on high resolution 64-layer Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) scanners. They are expensive to deploy on real-world autonomous driving sensor architectures which usually employ 16/32 layer LIDARs. We evaluate the effect of subsampling image based representations of dense point clouds on the accuracy of the road segmentation task. In our experiments the low resolution 16/32 layer LIDAR point clouds are simulated by subsampling the original 64 layer data, for subsequent transformation in to a feature map in the Bird-Eye-View (BEV) and SphericalView (SV) representations of the point cloud. We introduce the usage of the local normal vector with the LIDAR's spherical coordinates as an input channel to existing LoDNN architectures. We demonstrate that this local normal feature in conjunction with classical features not only improves performance for binary road segmentation on full resolution point clouds, but it also reduces the negative impact on the accuracy when subsampling dense point clouds as compared to the usage of classical features alone. We assess our method with several experiments on two datasets: KITTI Road-segmentation benchmark and the recently released Semantic KITTI dataset.

Hugues Thomas, Charles R. Qi, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud et al.

We present Kernel Point Convolution (KPConv), a new design of point convolution, i.e. that operates on point clouds without any intermediate representation. The convolution weights of KPConv are located in Euclidean space by kernel points, and applied to the input points close to them. Its capacity to use any number of kernel points gives KPConv more flexibility than fixed grid convolutions. Furthermore, these locations are continuous in space and can be learned by the network. Therefore, KPConv can be extended to deformable convolutions that learn to adapt kernel points to local geometry. Thanks to a regular subsampling strategy, KPConv is also efficient and robust to varying densities. Whether they use deformable KPConv for complex tasks, or rigid KPconv for simpler tasks, our networks outperform state-of-the-art classification and segmentation approaches on several datasets. We also offer ablation studies and visualizations to provide understanding of what has been learned by KPConv and to validate the descriptive power of deformable KPConv.

Hugues Thomas, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud, Beatriz Marcotegui et al.

This paper introduces a new definition of multiscale neighborhoods in 3D point clouds. This definition, based on spherical neighborhoods and proportional subsampling, allows the computation of features with a consistent geometrical meaning, which is not the case when using k-nearest neighbors. With an appropriate learning strategy, the proposed features can be used in a random forest to classify 3D points. In this semantic classification task, we show that our multiscale features outperform state-of-the-art features using the same experimental conditions. Furthermore, their classification power competes with more elaborate classification approaches including Deep Learning methods.

Jorge Hernandez, Beatriz Marcotegui

Dans cet article, nous présentons une méthode pour la détection et la classification d'artefacts au niveau du sol, comme phase de filtrage préalable à la modélisation d'environnements urbains. La méthode de détection est réalisée sur l'image profondeur, une projection de nuage de points sur un plan image où la valeur du pixel correspond à la distance du point au plan. En faisant l'hypothèse que les artefacts sont situés au sol, ils sont détectés par une transformation de chapeau haut de forme par remplissage de trous sur l'image de profondeur. Les composantes connexes ainsi obtenues, sont ensuite caractérisées et une analyse des variables est utilisée pour la sélection des caractéristiques les plus discriminantes. Les composantes connexes sont donc classifiées en quatre catégories (lampadaires, piétons, voitures et "Reste") à l'aide d'un algorithme d'apprentissage supervisé. La méthode a été testée sur des nuages de points de la ville de Paris, en montrant de bons résultats de détection et de classification dans l'ensemble de données.---In this article, we present a method for detection and classification of artifacts at the street level, in order to filter cloud point, facilitating the urban modeling process. Our approach exploits 3D information by using range image, a projection of 3D points onto an image plane where the pixel intensity is a function of the measured distance between 3D points and the plane. By assuming that the artifacts are on the ground, they are detected using a Top-Hat of the hole filling algorithm of range images. Then, several features are extracted from the detected connected components and a stepwise forward variable/model selection by using the Wilk's Lambda criterion is performed. Afterward, CCs are classified in four categories (lampposts, pedestrians, cars and others) by using a supervised machine learning method. The proposed method was tested on cloud points of Paris, and have shown satisfactory results on the whole dataset.