bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
INTEGRATION OF GIS AND BIM FOR INDOOR GEOVISUAL ANALYTICS
Authors: Wu B. , Zhang S.
Published: August 2016

This paper presents an endeavour of integration of GIS (Geographical Information System) and BIM (Building Information Modelling) for indoor geovisual analytics. The merits of two types of technologies, GIS and BIM are firstly analysed in the context of indoor environment. GIS has well-developed capabilities of spatial analysis such as network analysis, while BIM has the advantages for indoor 3D modelling and dynamic simulation. This paper firstly investigates the important aspects for integrating GIS and BIM. Different data standards and formats such as the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and GML (Geography Markup Language) are discussed. Their merits and limitations in data transformation between GIS and BIM are analysed in terms of semantic and geometric information. An optimized approach for data exchange between GIS and BIM datasets is then proposed. After that, a strategy of using BIM for 3D indoor modelling, GIS for spatial analysis, and BIM again for visualization and dynamic simulation of the analysis results is presented. Based on the developments, this paper selects a typical problem, optimized indoor emergency evacuation, to demonstrate the integration of GIS and BIM for indoor geovisual analytics. The block Z of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is selected as a test site. Detailed indoor and outdoor 3D models of the block Z are created using a BIM software Revit. The 3D models are transferred to a GIS software ArcGIS to carry out spatial analysis. Optimized evacuation plans considering dynamic constraints are generated based on network analysis in ArcGIS assuming there is a fire accident inside the building. The analysis results are then transferred back to BIM software for visualization and dynamic simulation. The developed methods and results are of significance to facilitate future development of GIS and BIM integrated solutions in various applications.
COMPARISON OF URBAN HUMAN MOVEMENTS INFERRING FROM MULTI-SOURCE SPATIAL-TEMPORAL DATA
Authors: Cao Rui , Tu Wei , Cao Jinzhou , Li Qingquan
Published: August 2016

The quantification of human movements is very hard because of the sparsity of traditional data and the labour intensive of the data collecting process. Recently, much spatial-temporal data give us an opportunity to observe human movement. This research investigates the relationship of city-wide human movements inferring from two types of spatial-temporal data at traffic analysis zone (TAZ) level. The first type of human movement is inferred from long-time smart card transaction data recording the boarding actions. The second type of human movement is extracted from citywide time sequenced mobile phone data with 30 minutes interval. Travel volume, travel distance and travel time are used to measure aggregated human movements in the city. To further examine the relationship between the two types of inferred movements, the linear correlation analysis is conducted on the hourly travel volume. The obtained results show that human movements inferred from smart card data and mobile phone data have a correlation of 0.635. However, there are still some non-ignorable differences in some special areas. This research not only reveals the citywide spatial-temporal human dynamic but also benefits the understanding of the reliability of the inference of human movements with big spatial-temporal data.
SHARING ON WEB 3D MODELS OF ANCIENT THEATRES. A METHODOLOGICAL WORKFLOW
Authors: Scianna A. , La Guardia M. , Scaduto M. L.
Published: August 2016

In the last few years, the need to share on the Web the knowledge of Cultural Heritage (CH) through navigable 3D models has increased. This need requires the availability of Web-based virtual reality systems and 3D WEBGIS. In order to make the information available to all stakeholders, these instruments should be powerful and at the same time very user-friendly. However, research and experiments carried out so far show that a standardized methodology doesn’t exist. All this is due both to complexity and dimensions of geometric models to be published, on the one hand, and to excessive costs of hardware and software tools, on the other. In light of this background, the paper describes a methodological approach for creating 3D models of CH, freely exportable on the Web, based on HTML5 and free and open source software. HTML5, supporting the WebGL standard, allows the exploration of 3D spatial models using most used Web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer. The methodological workflow here described has been tested for the construction of a multimedia geo-spatial platform developed for three-dimensional exploration and documentation of the ancient theatres of Segesta and of Carthage, and the surrounding landscapes. The experimental application has allowed us to explore the potential and limitations of sharing on the Web of 3D CH models based on WebGL standard. Sharing capabilities could be extended defining suitable geospatial Web-services based on capabilities of HTML5 and WebGL technology.
MEASURE LANDSCAPE DIVERSITY WITH LOGICAL SCOUT AGENTS
Authors: Wirth E. , Szabó G. , Czinkóczky A.
Published: August 2016

The Common Agricultural Policy reform of the EU focuses on three long-term objectives: viable food production, sustainable management of natural resources and climate action with balanced territorial development. To achieve these goals, the EU farming and subsidizing policies (EEA, 2014) support landscape heterogeneity and diversity. Current paper introduces an agent-based method to calculate the potential of landscape diversity. The method tries to catch the nature of heterogeneity using logic and modelling as opposed to the traditional statistical reasoning. The outlined Random Walk Scouting algorithm registers the land cover crossings of the scout agents to a Monte Carlo integral. The potential is proportional with the composition and the configuration (spatial character) of the landscape. Based on the measured points a potential map is derived to give an objective and quantitative basis to the stakeholders (policy makers, farmers).
EFFICIENT AND ACCURATE INDOOR LOCALIZATION USING LANDMARK GRAPHS
Authors: Gu F. , Kealy A. , Khoshelham K. , Shang J.
Published: August 2016

Indoor localization is important for a variety of applications such as location-based services, mobile social networks, and emergency response. Fusing spatial information is an effective way to achieve accurate indoor localization with little or with no need for extra hardware. However, existing indoor localization methods that make use of spatial information are either too computationally expensive or too sensitive to the completeness of landmark detection. In this paper, we solve this problem by using the proposed landmark graph. The landmark graph is a directed graph where nodes are landmarks (e.g., doors, staircases, and turns) and edges are accessible paths with heading information. We compared the proposed method with two common Dead Reckoning (DR)-based methods (namely, Compass + Accelerometer + Landmarks and Gyroscope + Accelerometer + Landmarks) by a series of experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 73% accuracy with a positioning error less than 2.5 meters, which outperforms the other two DR-based methods.
INVESTIGATING THE POTENTIAL OF ACTIVITY TRACKING APP DATA TO ESTIMATE CYCLE FLOWS IN URBAN AREAS
Authors: Haworth J.
Published: August 2016

Traffic congestion and its associated environmental effects pose a significant problem for large cities. Consequently, promoting and investing in green travel modes such as cycling is high on the agenda for many transport authorities. In order to target investment in cycling infrastructure and improve the experience of cyclists on the road, it is important to know where they are. Unfortunately, investment in intelligent transportation systems over the years has mainly focussed on monitoring vehicular traffic, and comparatively little is known about where cyclists are on a day to day basis. In London, for example, there are a limited number of automatic cycle counters installed on the network, which provide only part of the picture. These are supplemented by surveys that are carried out infrequently. Activity tracking apps on smart phones and GPS devices such as Strava have become very popular over recent years. Their intended use is to track physical activity and monitor training. However, many people routinely use such apps to record their daily commutes by bicycle. At the aggregate level, these data provide a potentially rich source of information about the movement and behaviour of cyclists. Before such data can be relied upon, however, it is necessary to examine their representativeness and understand their potential biases. In this study, the flows obtained from Strava Metro (SM) are compared with those obtained during the 2013 London Cycle Census (LCC). A set of linear regression models are constructed to predict LCC flows using SM flows along with a number of dummy variables including road type, hour of day, day of week and presence/absence of cycle lane. Cross-validation is used to test the fitted models on unseen LCC sites. SM flows are found to be a statistically significant (p<0.0001) predictor of total flows as measured by the LCC and the models yield R squared statistics of ~0.7 before considering spatio-temporal variation. The initial results indicate that data collected using fitness tracking apps such as Strava are a promising data source for traffic managers. Future work will incorporate the spatio-temporal structure in the data to better account for the spatial and temporal variation in the ratio of SM flows to LCC flows.
BIG GEO DATA MANAGEMENT: AN EXPLORATION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS OPEN DATA
Authors: Arias Munoz C. , Brovelli M. A. , Corti S. , Zamboni G.
Published: August 2016

The term Big Data has been recently used to define big, highly varied, complex data sets, which are created and updated at a high speed and require faster processing, namely, a reduced time to filter and analyse relevant data. These data is also increasingly becoming Open Data (data that can be freely distributed) made public by the government, agencies, private enterprises and among others. There are at least two issues that can obstruct the availability and use of Open Big Datasets: Firstly, the gathering and geoprocessing of these datasets are very computationally intensive; hence, it is necessary to integrate high-performance solutions, preferably internet based, to achieve the goals. Secondly, the problems of heterogeneity and inconsistency in geospatial data are well known and affect the data integration process, but is particularly problematic for Big Geo Data. Therefore, Big Geo Data integration will be one of the most challenging issues to solve. With these applications, we demonstrate that is possible to provide processed Big Geo Data to common users, using open geospatial standards and technologies. NoSQL databases like MongoDB and frameworks like RASDAMAN could offer different functionalities that facilitate working with larger volumes and more heterogeneous geospatial data sources.
SENSING SLOW MOBILITY AND INTERESTING LOCATIONS FOR LOMBARDY REGION (ITALY): A CASE STUDY USING POINTWISE GEOLOCATED OPEN DATA
Authors: Brovelli M. A. , Oxoli D. , Zurbarán M. A.
Published: August 2016

During the past years Web 2.0 technologies have caused the emergence of platforms where users can share data related to their activities which in some cases are then publicly released with open licenses. Popular categories for this include community platforms where users can upload GPS tracks collected during slow travel activities (e.g. hiking, biking and horse riding) and platforms where users share their geolocated photos. However, due to the high heterogeneity of the information available on the Web, the sole use of these user-generated contents makes it an ambitious challenge to understand slow mobility flows as well as to detect the most visited locations in a region. Exploiting the available data on community sharing websites allows to collect near real-time open data streams and enables rigorous spatial-temporal analysis. This work presents an approach for collecting, unifying and analysing pointwise geolocated open data available from different sources with the aim of identifying the main locations and destinations of slow mobility activities. For this purpose, we collected pointwise open data from the Wikiloc platform, Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare. The analysis was confined to the data uploaded in Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) – corresponding to millions of pointwise data. Collected data was processed through the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in order to organize them into a suitable database. This allowed to run statistical analyses on data distribution in both time and space by enabling the detection of users’ slow mobility preferences as well as places of interest at a regional scale.
AN OBJECT-RELATIONAL IFC STORAGE MODEL BASED ON ORACLE DATABASE
Authors: Li Hang , Liu Hua , Liu Yong , Wang Yuan
Published: August 2016

With the building models are getting increasingly complicated, the levels of collaboration across professionals attract more attention in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. In order to adapt the change, buildingSMART developed Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to facilitate the interoperability between software platforms. However, IFC data are currently shared in the form of text file, which is defective. In this paper, considering the object-based inheritance hierarchy of IFC and the storage features of different database management systems (DBMS), we propose a novel object-relational storage model that uses Oracle database to store IFC data. Firstly, establish the mapping rules between data types in IFC specification and Oracle database. Secondly, design the IFC database according to the relationships among IFC entities. Thirdly, parse the IFC file and extract IFC data. And lastly, store IFC data into corresponding tables in IFC database. In experiment, three different building models are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of our storage model. The comparison of experimental statistics proves that IFC data are lossless during data exchange.
SPATIAL-TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF URBAN FIRE INCIDENTS: A CASE STUDY OF NANJING, CHINA
Authors: Yao J. , Zhang X.
Published: August 2016

Fire and rescue service is one of the fundamental public services provided by government in order to protect people, properties and environment from fires and other disasters, and thus promote a safer living environment. Well understanding spatial-temporal dynamics of fire incidents can offer insights for potential determinants of various fire events and enable better fire risk estimation, assisting future allocation of prevention resources and strategic planning of mitigation programs. Using a 12-year (2002-2013) dataset containing the urban fire events in Nanjing, China, this research explores the spatial-temporal dynamics of urban fire incidents. A range of exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) approaches and tools, such as spatial kernel density and co-maps, are employed to examine the spatial, temporal and spatial-temporal variations of the fire events. Particular attention has been paid to two types of fire incidents: residential properties and local facilities, due to their relatively higher occurrence frequencies. The results demonstrated that the amount of urban fire has greatly increased in the last decade and spatial-temporal distribution of fire events vary among different incident types, which implies varying impact of potential influencing factors for further investigation.
EVALUATION OF THE USER STRATEGY ON 2D AND 3D CITY MAPS BASED ON NOVEL SCANPATH COMPARISON METHOD AND GRAPH VISUALIZATION
Authors: Dolezalova J. , Popelka S.
Published: August 2016

The paper is dealing with scanpath comparison of eye-tracking data recorded during case study focused on the evaluation of 2D and 3D city maps. The experiment contained screenshots from three map portals. Two types of maps were used - standard map and 3D visualization. Respondents’ task was to find particular point symbol on the map as fast as possible.

 Scanpath comparison is one group of the eye-tracking data analyses methods used for revealing the strategy of the respondents. In cartographic studies, the most commonly used application for scanpath comparison is eyePatterns that output is hierarchical clustering and a tree graph representing the relationships between analysed sequences. During an analysis of the algorithm generating a tree graph, it was found that the outputs do not correspond to the reality. We proceeded to the creation of a new tool called ScanGraph. This tool uses visualization of cliques in simple graphs and is freely available at www.eyetracking.upol.cz/scangraph.

 Results of the study proved the functionality of the tool and its suitability for analyses of different strategies of map readers. Based on the results of the tool, similar scanpaths were selected, and groups of respondents with similar strategies were identified. With this knowledge, it is possible to analyse the relationship between belonging to the group with similar strategy and data gathered from the questionnaire (age, sex, cartographic knowledge, etc.) or type of stimuli (2D, 3D map).
EYE TRACKING TO EXPLORE THE IMPACTS OF PHOTOREALISTIC 3D REPRESENTATIONS IN PEDSTRIAN NAVIGATION PERFORMANCE
Authors: Dong Weihua , Liao Hua
Published: August 2016

Despite the now-ubiquitous two-dimensional (2D) maps, photorealistic three-dimensional (3D) representations of cities (e.g., Google Earth) have gained much attention by scientists and public users as another option. However, there is no consistent evidence on the influences of 3D photorealism on pedestrian navigation. Whether 3D photorealism can communicate cartographic information for navigation with higher effectiveness and efficiency and lower cognitive workload compared to the traditional symbolic 2D maps remains unknown. This study aims to explore whether the photorealistic 3D representation can facilitate processes of map reading and navigation in digital environments using a lab-based eye tracking approach. Here we show the differences of symbolic 2D maps versus photorealistic 3D representations depending on users’ eye-movement and navigation behaviour data. We found that the participants using the 3D representation were less effective, less efficient and were required higher cognitive workload than using the 2D map for map reading. However, participants using the 3D representation performed more efficiently in self-localization and orientation at the complex decision points. The empirical results can be helpful to improve the usability of pedestrian navigation maps in future designs.
COMPARISON OF USER PERFORMANCE WITH INTERACTIVE AND STATIC 3D VISUALIZATION – PILOT STUDY
Authors: Herman L. , Stachoň Z.
Published: August 2016

Interactive 3D visualizations of spatial data are currently available and popular through various applications such as Google Earth, ArcScene, etc. Several scientific studies have focused on user performance with 3D visualization, but static perspective views are used as stimuli in most of the studies. The main objective of this paper is to try to identify potential differences in user performance with static perspective views and interactive visualizations. This research is an exploratory study. An experiment was designed as a between-subject study and a customized testing tool based on open web technologies was used for the experiment. The testing set consists of an initial questionnaire, a training task and four experimental tasks. Selection of the highest point and determination of visibility from the top of a mountain were used as the experimental tasks. Speed and accuracy of each task performance of participants were recorded. The movement and actions in the virtual environment were also recorded within the interactive variant. The results show that participants deal with the tasks faster when using static visualization. The average error rate was also higher in the static variant. The findings from this pilot study will be used for further testing, especially for formulating of hypotheses and designing of subsequent experiments.
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN PERCEPTION OF BUILDING CATEGORIES IN VIRTUAL 3D CITIES - A USER STUDY
Authors: Tutzauer P. , Becker S. , Niese T. , Deussen O. , Fritsch D.
Published: August 2016

Virtual 3D cities are becoming increasingly important as a means of visually communicating diverse urban-related information. To get a deeper understanding of a human’s cognitive experience of virtual 3D cities, this paper presents a user study on the human ability to perceive building categories (e.g. residential home, office building, building with shops etc.) from geometric 3D building representations. The study reveals various dependencies between geometric properties of the 3D representations and the perceptibility of the building categories. Knowledge about which geometries are relevant, helpful or obstructive for perceiving a specific building category is derived. The importance and usability of such knowledge is demonstrated based on a perception-guided 3D building abstraction process.
WALKABILITY FOR DIFFERENT URBAN GRANULARITIES
Authors: Hollenstein D. , Bleisch S.
Published: August 2016

The positive effects of low-intensity physical activity are widely acknowledged and in this context walking is often promoted as an active form of transport. Under the concept of walkability the role of the built environment in encouraging walking is investigated. For that purpose, walkability is quantified area-wise by measuring a varying set of built environment attributes. In purely GIS-based approaches to studying walkability, indices are generally built using existing and easily accessible data. These include street network design, population density, land use mix, and access to destinations. Access to destinations is usually estimated using either a fixed radius, or distances in the street network. In this paper, two approaches to approximate a footpath network are presented. The two footpath networks were built making different assumptions regarding the walkability of different street types with respect to more or less restrictive safety preferences. Information on sidewalk presence, pedestrian crossings, and traffic restrictions were used to build both networks. The first network comprises car traffic free areas only. The second network includes streets with low speed limits that have no sidewalks. Both networks are compared to the more commonly used street network in an access-to-distance analysis. The results suggest that for the generally highly walkable study area, access to destination mostly depends on destination density within the defined walkable distance. However, on single street segments access to destinations is diminished when only car traffic free spaces are assumed to be walkable.
PARALLEL PROCESSING OF BIG POINT CLOUDS USING Z-ORDER-BASED PARTITIONING
Authors: Alis C. , Boehm J. , Liu K.
Published: August 2016

As laser scanning technology improves and costs are coming down, the amount of point cloud data being generated can be prohibitively difficult and expensive to process on a single machine. This data explosion is not only limited to point cloud data. Voluminous amounts of high-dimensionality and quickly accumulating data, collectively known as Big Data, such as those generated by social media, Internet of Things devices and commercial transactions, are becoming more prevalent as well. New computing paradigms and frameworks are being developed to efficiently handle the processing of Big Data, many of which utilize a compute cluster composed of several commodity grade machines to process chunks of data in parallel.

 A central concept in many of these frameworks is data locality. By its nature, Big Data is large enough that the entire dataset would not fit on the memory and hard drives of a single node hence replicating the entire dataset to each worker node is impractical. The data must then be partitioned across worker nodes in a manner that minimises data transfer across the network. This is a challenge for point cloud data because there exist different ways to partition data and they may require data transfer.

 We propose a partitioning based on Z-order which is a form of locality-sensitive hashing. The Z-order or Morton code is computed by dividing each dimension to form a grid then interleaving the binary representation of each dimension. For example, the Z-order code for the grid square with coordinates (x = 1 = 012, y = 3 = 112) is 10112 = 11. The number of points in each partition is controlled by the number of bits per dimension: the more bits, the fewer the points. The number of bits per dimension also controls the level of detail with more bits yielding finer partitioning. We present this partitioning method by implementing it on Apache Spark and investigating how different parameters affect the accuracy and running time of the k nearest neighbour algorithm for a hemispherical and a triangular wave point cloud.
3D NEAREST NEIGHBOUR SEARCH USING A CLUSTERED HIERARCHICAL TREE STRUCTURE
Authors: Suhaibah A. , Uznir U. , Anton F. , Mioc D. , Rahman A. A.
Published: August 2016

Locating and analysing the location of new stores or outlets is one of the common issues facing retailers and franchisers. This is due to assure that new opening stores are at their strategic location to attract the highest possible number of customers. Spatial information is used to manage, maintain and analyse these store locations. However, since the business of franchising and chain stores in urban areas runs within high rise multi-level buildings, a three-dimensional (3D) method is prominently required in order to locate and identify the surrounding information such as at which level of the franchise unit will be located or is the franchise unit located is at the best level for visibility purposes. One of the common used analyses used for retrieving the surrounding information is Nearest Neighbour (NN) analysis. It uses a point location and identifies the surrounding neighbours. However, with the immense number of urban datasets, the retrieval and analysis of nearest neighbour information and their efficiency will become more complex and crucial. In this paper, we present a technique to retrieve nearest neighbour information in 3D space using a clustered hierarchical tree structure. Based on our findings, the proposed approach substantially showed an improvement of response time analysis compared to existing approaches of spatial access methods in databases. The query performance was tested using a dataset consisting of 500,000 point locations building and franchising unit. The results are presented in this paper. Another advantage of this structure is that it also offers a minimal overlap and coverage among nodes which can reduce repetitive data entry.
EXTERIOR ORIENTATION ESTIMATION OF OBLIQUE AERIAL IMAGERY USING VANISHING POINTS
Authors: Verykokou Styliani , Ioannidis Charalabos
Published: August 2016

In this paper, a methodology for the calculation of rough exterior orientation (EO) parameters of multiple large-scale overlapping oblique aerial images, in the case that GPS/INS information is not available (e.g., for old datasets), is presented. It consists of five main steps; (a) the determination of the overlapping image pairs and the single image in which four ground control points have to be measured; (b) the computation of the transformation parameters from every image to the coordinate reference system; (c) the rough estimation of the camera interior orientation parameters; (d) the estimation of the true horizon line and the nadir point of each image; (e) the calculation of the rough EO parameters of each image. A developed software suite implementing the proposed methodology is tested using a set of UAV multi-perspective oblique aerial images. Several tests are performed for the assessment of the errors and show that the estimated EO parameters can be used either as initial approximations for a bundle adjustment procedure or as rough georeferencing information for several applications, like 3D modelling, even by non-photogrammetrists, because of the minimal user intervention needed. Finally, comparisons with a commercial software are made, in terms of automation and correctness of the computed EO parameters.
BARE-EARTH EXTRACTION AND DTM GENERATION FROM PHOTOGRAMMETRIC POINT CLOUDS WITH A PARTIAL USE OF AN EXISTING LOWER RESOLUTION DTM
Authors: Debella-Gilo M.
Published: August 2016

A method of extracting bare-earth points from photogrammetric point clouds by partially using an existing lower resolution digital terrain model (DTM) is presented. The bare-earth points are extracted based on a threshold defined by local slope. The local slope is estimated from the lower resolution DTM. A gridded DTM is then interpolated from the extracted bare-earth points. Five different interpolation algorithms are implemented and evaluated to identify the most suitable interpolation method for such non-uniformly scattered data. The algorithm is tested on four test sites with varying topographic and ground cover characteristics. The results are evaluated against a reference DTM created using aerial laser scanning. The deviations of the extracted bare-earth points, and the interpolated DTM, from the reference DTM increases with increasing forest canopy density and terrain roughness. The DTM created by the method is significantly closer to the reference DTM than the lower resolution national DTM. The ANUDEM (Australian National University Digital Elevation Modelling) interpolation method is found to be the best performing interpolation method in terms of reducing the deviations and in terms of modelling the terrain realistically with minimum artefacts, although the differences among the interpolation methods are not considerably large.
FOREST STAND SEGMENTATION USING AIRBORNE LIDAR DATA AND VERY HIGH RESOLUTION MULTISPECTRAL IMAGERY
Authors: Dechesne Clément , Mallet Clément , Le Bris Arnaud , Gouet Valérie , Hervieu Alexandre
Published: August 2016

Forest stands are the basic units for forest inventory and mapping. Stands are large forested areas (e.g., ≥ 2 ha) of homogeneous tree species composition. The accurate delineation of forest stands is usually performed by visual analysis of human operators on very high resolution (VHR) optical images. This work is highly time consuming and should be automated for scalability purposes. In this paper, a method based on the fusion of airborne laser scanning data (or lidar) and very high resolution multispectral imagery for automatic forest stand delineation and forest land-cover database update is proposed. The multispectral images give access to the tree species whereas 3D lidar point clouds provide geometric information on the trees. Therefore, multi-modal features are computed, both at pixel and object levels. The objects are individual trees extracted from lidar data. A supervised classification is performed at the object level on the computed features in order to coarsely discriminate the existing tree species in the area of interest. The analysis at tree level is particularly relevant since it significantly improves the tree species classification. A probability map is generated through the tree species classification and inserted with the pixel-based features map in an energetical framework. The proposed energy is then minimized using a standard graph-cut method (namely QPBO with α-expansion) in order to produce a segmentation map with a controlled level of details. Comparison with an existing forest land cover database shows that our method provides satisfactory results both in terms of stand labelling and delineation (matching ranges between 94% and 99%).
Performance Evaluation of Alternative Relative Orientation Procedures for UAV-based Imagery with Prior Flight Trajectory Information
Authors: He F. , Habib A.
Published: August 2016

Thanks to recent advances at the hardware (e.g., emergence of reliable platforms at low cost) and software (e.g., automated identification of conjugate points in overlapping images) levels, UAV-based 3D reconstruction has been widely used in various applications. However, mitigating the impact of outliers in automatically matched points in UAV imagery, especially when dealing with scenes that has poor and/or repetitive texture, remains to be a challenging task. In spite of the fact that existing literature has already demonstrated that incorporating prior motion information can play an important role in increasing the reliability of the matching process, there is a lack of methodologies that are mainly suited for UAV imagery. Assuming the availability of prior information regarding the trajectory of a UAV-platform, this paper presents a two-point approach for reliable estimation of Relative Orientation Parameters (ROPs) of UAV-based images. This approach is based on the assumption that the UAV platform is moving at a constant flying height while maintaining the camera in a nadir-looking orientation. For this flight scenario, a closed-form solution that can be derived using a minimum of two pairs of conjugate points is established. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, experimental tests using real stereo-pairs acquired from different UAV platforms have been conducted. The derived results from the comparative performance analysis against the Nistér five-point approach demonstrate that the proposed two-point approach is capable of providing reliable estimate of the ROPs from UAV-based imagery in the presence of poor and/or repetitive texture with high percentage of matching outliers.
AUTOMATED MOSAICKING OF MULTIPLE 3D POINT CLOUDS GENERATED FROM A DEPTH CAMERA
Authors: Kim H. , Yoon W. , Kim T.
Published: August 2016

In this paper, we propose a method for automated mosaicking of multiple 3D point clouds generated from a depth camera. A depth camera generates depth data by using ToF (Time of Flight) method and intensity data by using intensity of returned signal. The depth camera used in this paper was a SR4000 from MESA Imaging. This camera generates a depth map and intensity map of 176 x 44 pixels. Generated depth map saves physical depth data with mm of precision. Generated intensity map contains texture data with many noises. We used texture maps for extracting tiepoints and depth maps for assigning z coordinates to tiepoints and point cloud mosaicking. There are four steps in the proposed mosaicking method. In the first step, we acquired multiple 3D point clouds by rotating depth camera and capturing data per rotation. In the second step, we estimated 3D-3D transformation relationships between subsequent point clouds. For this, 2D tiepoints were extracted automatically from the corresponding two intensity maps. They were converted into 3D tiepoints using depth maps. We used a 3D similarity transformation model for estimating the 3D-3D transformation relationships. In the third step, we converted local 3D-3D transformations into a global transformation for all point clouds with respect to a reference one. In the last step, the extent of single depth map mosaic was calculated and depth values per mosaic pixel were determined by a ray tracing method. For experiments, 8 depth maps and intensity maps were used. After the four steps, an output mosaicked depth map of 454x144 was generated. It is expected that the proposed method would be useful for developing an effective 3D indoor mapping method in future.
TENSOR MODELING BASED FOR AIRBORNE LiDAR DATA CLASSIFICATION
Authors: Li N. , Liu C. , Pfeifer N. , Yin J. F. , Liao Z.Y. , Zhou Y.
Published: August 2016

Feature selection and description is a key factor in classification of Earth observation data. In this paper a classification method based on tensor decomposition is proposed. First, multiple features are extracted from raw LiDAR point cloud, and raster LiDAR images are derived by accumulating features or the “raw” data attributes. Then, the feature rasters of LiDAR data are stored as a tensor, and tensor decomposition is used to select component features. This tensor representation could keep the initial spatial structure and insure the consideration of the neighborhood. Based on a small number of component features a k nearest neighborhood classification is applied.
AN EFFICIENT METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC ROAD EXTRACTION BASED ON MULTIPLE FEATURES FROM LiDAR DATA
Authors: Li Y. , Hu X. , Guan H. , Liu P.
Published: August 2016

The road extraction in urban areas is difficult task due to the complicated patterns and many contextual objects. LiDAR data directly provides three dimensional (3D) points with less occlusions and smaller shadows. The elevation information and surface roughness are distinguishing features to separate roads. However, LiDAR data has some disadvantages are not beneficial to object extraction, such as the irregular distribution of point clouds and lack of clear edges of roads. For these problems, this paper proposes an automatic road centerlines extraction method which has three major steps: (1) road center point detection based on multiple feature spatial clustering for separating road points from ground points, (2) local principal component analysis with least squares fitting for extracting the primitives of road centerlines, and (3) hierarchical grouping for connecting primitives into complete roads network. Compared with MTH (consist of Mean shift algorithm, Tensor voting, and Hough transform) proposed in our previous article, this method greatly reduced the computational cost. To evaluate the proposed method, the Vaihingen data set, a benchmark testing data provided by ISPRS for “Urban Classification and 3D Building Reconstruction” project, was selected. The experimental results show that our method achieve the same performance by less time in road extraction using LiDAR data.
PERSPECTIVE INTENSITY IMAGES FOR CO-REGISTRATION OF TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER AND DIGITAL CAMERA
Authors: Liang Yubin , Qiu Yan , Cui Tiejun
Published: August 2016

Co-registration of terrestrial laser scanner and digital camera has been an important topic of research, since reconstruction of visually appealing and measurable models of the scanned objects can be achieved by using both point clouds and digital images. This paper presents an approach for co-registration of terrestrial laser scanner and digital camera. A perspective intensity image of the point cloud is firstly generated by using the collinearity equation. Then corner points are extracted from the generated perspective intensity image and the camera image. The fundamental matrix F is then estimated using several interactively selected tie points and used to obtain more matches with RANSAC. The 3D coordinates of all the matched tie points are directly obtained or estimated using the least squares method. The robustness and effectiveness of the presented methodology is demonstrated by the experimental results. Methods presented in this work may also be used for automatic registration of terrestrial laser scanning point clouds.
TOWARDS OBJECT DRIVEN FLOOR PLAN EXTRACTION FROM LASER POINT CLOUD
Authors: Babacan K. , Jung J. , Wichmann A. , Jahromi B. A. , Shahbazi M. , Sohn G. , Kada M.
Published: August 2016

During the last years, the demand for indoor models has increased for various purposes. As a provisional step to proceed towards higher dimensional indoor models, powerful and flexible floor plans can be utilised. Therefore, several methods have been proposed that provide automatically generated floor plans from laser point clouds. The prevailing methodology seeks to attain semantic enhancement of a model (e.g. the identification and labelling of its components) built upon already reconstructed (a priori) geometry. In contrast, this paper demonstrates preliminary research on the possibility to directly incorporate semantic knowledge, which is itself derived from the raw data during the extraction, into the geometric modelling process. In this regard, we propose a new method to automatically extract floor plans from raw point clouds. It is based on a hierarchical space partitioning of the data, integrated with primitive selection actuated by object detection. First, planar primitives corresponding to vertical architectural structures are extracted using M-estimator SAmple and Consensus (MSAC). The set of the resulting line segments are refined by a selection process through a novel door detection algorithm, considering optimization of prior information and fitness to the data. The selected lines are used as hyperlines to partition the space into enclosed areas. Finally, a floor plan is extracted from these partitions by Minimum Description Length (MDL) hypothesis ranking. The algorithm is applied on a real mobile laser scanner dataset and the results are evaluated both in terms of door detection and consecutive floor plan extraction.
MULTIPARAMETER CORRECTION INTENSITY OF TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING DATA AS AN INPUT FOR ROCK SURFACE MODELLING
Authors: Paleček V. , Kubíček P.
Published: August 2016

A large increase in the creation of 3D models of objects all around us can be observed in the last few years; thanks to the help of the rapid development of new advanced technologies for spatial data collection and robust software tools. A new commercially available airborne laser scanning data in Czech Republic, provided in the form of the Digital terrain model of the fifth generation as irregularly spaced points, enable locating the majority of rock formations. However, the positional and height accuracy of this type of landforms can reach huge errors in some cases. Therefore, it is necessary to start mapping using terrestrial laser scanning with the possibility of adding a point cloud data derived from ground or aerial photogrammetry. Intensity correction and noise removal is usually based on the distance between measured objects and the laser scanner, the incidence angle of the beam or on the radiometric and topographic characteristics of measured objects. This contribution represents the major undesirable effects that affect the quality of acquisition and processing of laser scanning data. Likewise there is introduced solutions to some of these problems.
COMPARISON OF SEMI AUTOMATIC DTM FROM IMAGE MATCHING WITH DTM FROM LIDAR
Authors: Rahmayudi Aji , Rizaldy Aldino
Published: August 2016

Nowadays DTM LIDAR was used extensively for generating contour line in Topographic Map. This method is very superior compared to traditionally stereomodel compilation from aerial images that consume large resource of human operator and very time consuming. Since the improvement of computer vision and digital image processing, it is possible to generate point cloud DSM from aerial images using image matching algorithm. It is also possible to classify point cloud DSM to DTM using the same technique with LIDAR classification and producing DTM which is comparable to DTM LIDAR. This research will study the accuracy difference of both DTMs and the result of DTM in several different condition including urban area and forest area, flat terrain and mountainous terrain, also time calculation for mass production Topographic Map. From statistical data, both methods are able to produce 1:5.000 Topographic Map scale.
DIGITAL TERRAIN MODELS FROM MOBILE LASER SCANNING DATA IN MORAVIAN KARST
Authors: Tyagur N. , Hollaus M.
Published: August 2016

During the last ten years, mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems have become a very popular and efficient technology for capturing reality in 3D. A 3D laser scanner mounted on the top of a moving vehicle (e.g. car) allows the high precision capturing of the environment in a fast way. Mostly this technology is used in cities for capturing roads and buildings facades to create 3D city models. In our work, we used an MLS system in Moravian Karst, which is a protected nature reserve in the Eastern Part of the Czech Republic, with a steep rocky terrain covered by forests. For the 3D data collection, the Riegl VMX 450, mounted on a car, was used with integrated IMU/GNSS equipment, which provides low noise, rich and very dense 3D point clouds.

 The aim of this work is to create a digital terrain model (DTM) from several MLS data sets acquired in the neighbourhood of a road. The total length of two covered areas is 3.9 and 6.1 km respectively, with an average width of 100 m. For the DTM generation, a fully automatic, robust, hierarchic approach was applied. The derivation of the DTM is based on combinations of hierarchical interpolation and robust filtering for different resolution levels. For the generation of the final DTMs, different interpolation algorithms are applied to the classified terrain points. The used parameters were determined by explorative analysis. All MLS data sets were processed with one parameter set. As a result, a high precise DTM was derived with high spatial resolution of 0.25 x 0.25 m. The quality of the DTMs was checked by geodetic measurements and visual comparison with raw point clouds. The high quality of the derived DTM can be used for analysing terrain changes and morphological structures. Finally, the derived DTM was compared with the DTM of the Czech Republic (DMR 4G) with a resolution of 5 x 5 m, which was created from airborne laser scanning data. The vertical accuracy of the derived DTMs is around 0.10 m.
A WEIGHTED CLOSED-FORM SOLUTION FOR RGB-D DATA REGISTRATION
Authors: Vestena K. M. , Dos Santos D. R. , Oilveira Jr. E. M. , Pavan N. L. , Khoshelham K.
Published: August 2016

Existing 3D indoor mapping of RGB-D data are prominently point-based and feature-based methods. In most cases iterative closest point (ICP) and its variants are generally used for pairwise registration process. Considering that the ICP algorithm requires an relatively accurate initial transformation and high overlap a weighted closed-form solution for RGB-D data registration is proposed. In this solution, we weighted and normalized the 3D points based on the theoretical random errors and the dual-number quaternions are used to represent the 3D rigid body motion. Basically, dual-number quaternions provide a closed-form solution by minimizing a cost function. The most important advantage of the closed-form solution is that it provides the optimal transformation in one-step, it does not need to calculate good initial estimates and expressively decreases the demand for computer resources in contrast to the iterative method. Basically, first our method exploits RGB information. We employed a scale invariant feature transformation (SIFT) for extracting, detecting, and matching features. It is able to detect and describe local features that are invariant to scaling and rotation. To detect and filter outliers, we used random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, jointly with an statistical dispersion called interquartile range (IQR). After, a new RGB-D loop-closure solution is implemented based on the volumetric information between pair of point clouds and the dispersion of the random errors. The loop-closure consists to recognize when the sensor revisits some region. Finally, a globally consistent map is created to minimize the registration errors via a graph-based optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with a Kinect dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method can properly map the indoor environment with an absolute accuracy around 1.5% of the travel of a trajectory.