Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (7): 1280-1293.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2025.20230481

• Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A U-shaped graph convolution network method for semantic segmentation of vehicle LiDAR point clouds towards urban road scenes

Jie WAN1(), Zhong XIE2,3(), Yongyang XU2, Liufeng TAO2,3   

  1. 1.Changjiang Spatial Information Technology Engineering Co., Ltd., (Wuhan), Wuhan 430074, China
    2.Department of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
    3.Key Laboratory of Geological Survey and Evaluation of Ministry of Education, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
  • Received:2023-10-17 Revised:2025-04-17 Online:2025-08-18 Published:2025-08-18
  • Contact: Zhong XIE E-mail:wanjie@cug.edu.cn;xiezhong@cug.edu.cn
  • About author:WAN Jie (1993—), male, PhD candidate, majors in intelligent analysis and processing of 3D point clouds. E-mail: wanjie@cug.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The Opening Fund of Key Laboratory of Geological Survey and Evaluation of Ministry of Education(GLAB2024ZR08);The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

Abstract:

Semantic segmentation of vehicle LiDAR point clouds aims to extract the 3D information of roads and various roadside objects, which is crucial for the objectification and 3D modeling of urban road scenes. Aiming at the challenges faced by current deep learning networks in handling vehicle LiDAR point clouds, including architectural constraints and difficulties in effectively extracting and utilizing multi-scale information, leading to inaccuracies in segmenting small objects, incomplete objects and occluded objects, this paper proposes a point cloud semantic segmentation method based on the U-shaped graph convolutional network (U-GCN). The proposed method firstly designed a dynamic graph convolutional operators that utilized learnable graph convolutional point kernels to adaptively extract local geometric features from the point cloud. Additionally, the cascaded dynamic graph convolutional operators were employed to construct a local feature aggregation module and expand the receptive field, enabling the capture of structural and contextual information on the objects. Subsequently, combined with the U-shaped encoder-decoder network architecture, deep and shallow point features are fused through skip connections to obtain multi-scale detailed information of objects, so as to enhance the feature representation of objects. Finally, a deep supervision loss function was introduced to guide the network to utilize output prediction information from different layers for the multiscale supervision training, further improving the network robustness and overall performance. Experiments on the Toronto-3D and WHU-MLS datasets show that the proposed method outperformed current mainstream networks in both visual analysis and quantitative evaluation. It can effectively improve the low segmentation accuracy caused by object scale variations, occlusion, and data incompleteness.

Key words: vehicle LiDAR point cloud, semantic segmentation, U-shaped graph convolution network, multiscale feature fusion, deep supervision

CLC Number: