Semantic segmentation of point clouds from scanning lidars

A point cloud can provide a detailed three dimensional (3D) description of a scene. Partitioning of a point cloud into semantic classes is important for scene understanding, which can be used in autonomous navigation for unmanned vehicles and in applications including surveillance, mapping, and reconnaissance. In this paper, we give a review of recent machine learning techniques for semantic segmentation of point clouds from scanning lidars and an overview of model compression techniques. We focus especially on scan-based learning approaches, which operate on single sensor sweeps. These methods do not require data registration and are suitable for real-time applications. We demonstrate how these semantic segmentation techniques can be used in defence applications in surveillance or mapping scenarios with a scanning lidar mounted on a small UAV.