HYBRID ACQUISITION OF HIGH QUALITY TRAINING DATA FOR SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION OF 3D POINT CLOUDS USING CROWD-BASED ACTIVE LEARNING

• Main Authors: M. Kölle, V. Walter, S. Schmohl, U. Soergel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020-08-01
• Series: ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
• Online Access: https://www.isprs-ann-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.net/V-2-2020/501/2020/isprs-annals-V-2-2020-501-2020.pdf
• ISSN: 2194-9042; 2194-9050

Automated semantic interpretation of 3D point clouds is crucial for many tasks in the domain of geospatial data analysis. For this purpose, labeled training data is required, which has often to be provided manually by experts. One approach to minimize effort in terms of costs of human interaction is Active Learning (AL). The aim is to process only the subset of an unlabeled dataset that is particularly helpful with respect to class separation. Here a machine identifies informative instances which are then labeled by humans, thereby increasing the performance of the machine. In order to completely avoid involvement of an expert, this time-consuming annotation can be resolved via crowdsourcing. Therefore, we propose an approach combining AL with paid crowdsourcing. Although incorporating human interaction, our method can run fully automatically, so that only an unlabeled dataset and a fixed financial budget for the payment of the crowdworkers need to be provided. We conduct multiple iteration steps of the AL process on the <i>ISPRS Vaihingen 3D Semantic Labeling</i> benchmark dataset (V3D) and especially evaluate the performance of the crowd when labeling 3D points. We prove our concept by using labels derived from our crowd-based AL method for classifying the test dataset. The analysis outlines that by labeling only 0:4% of the training dataset by the crowd and spending less than 145&thinsp;$, both our trained Random Forest and sparse 3D CNN classifier differ in Overall Accuracy by less than 3 percentage points compared to the same classifiers trained on the complete V3D training set.