Object shape classification and scene shape representation for three-dimensional laser scanned outdoor data

Shape analysis of a three-dimensional (3-D) scene is an important issue and could be widely used for various applications: city planning, robot navigation, virtual tourism, etc. We introduce an approach for understanding the primitive shape of the scene to reveal the semantic scene shape structure and represent the scene using shape elements. The scene objects are labeled and recognized using the geometric and semantic features for each cluster, which is based on the knowledge of scene. Furthermore, the object in scene with a different primitive shape could also be classified and fitted using the Gaussian map of the segmented scene. We demonstrate the presented approach on several complex scenes from laser scanning. According to the experimental result, the proposed method can accurately represent the geometric structure of the 3-D scene. (C) 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.52.2.024301]