Local quality assessment of point clouds for indoor mobile mapping

• A point cloud dataset with multiple kinds of quality problems is created.
• The main causes of point cloud data degradation in indoor mobile mapping is analyzed.
• A novel semi-supervised framework is proposed for quality assessment of indoor mobile mapping point cloud data.

The quality of point clouds obtained by RGB-D camera-based indoor mobile mapping can be limited by local degradation because of complex scenarios such as sensor characteristics, partial occlusions, cluttered backgrounds, and complex illumination conditions. This paper presents a machine learning framework to assess the local quality of indoor mobile mapping point cloud data. In our proposed framework, a point cloud dataset with multiple kinds of quality problems is first created by manual annotation and degradation simulation. Then, feature extraction methods based on 3D patches are treated as operating units to conduct quality assessment in local regions. Also, a feature selection algorithm is deployed to obtain the essential components of feature sets that are used to effectively represent local degradation. Finally, a semi-supervised method is introduced to classify quality types of point clouds. Comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework obtained promising quality assessment results with limited labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data.