Active and incremental learning for semantic ALS point cloud segmentation

Supervised training of a deep neural network for semantic segmentation of point clouds requires a large amount of labelled data. Nowadays, it is easy to acquire a huge number of points with high density in large-scale areas using current LiDAR and photogrammetric techniques. However it is extremely time-consuming to manually label point clouds for model training. We propose an active and incremental learning strategy to iteratively query informative point cloud data for manual annotation and the model is continuously trained to adapt to the newly labelled samples in each iteration. We evaluate the data informativeness step by step and effectively and incrementally enrich the model knowledge. We use the airborne laser scanning point clouds captured over the Rotterdam central to evaluate our proposed method.