A 3D Point Cloud Feature Identification Method Based on Improved Point Feature Histogram Descriptor

Abstract

A significant amount of research has been conducted on the segmentation of large-scale 3D point clouds. However, efficient point cloud feature identification from segmentation results is an essential capability for computer vision and surveying tasks. Feature description methods are algorithms that convert the point set of the point cloud feature into vectors or matrices that can be used for identification. While the point feature histogram (PFH) is an efficient descriptor method, it does not work well with objects that have smooth surfaces, such as planar, spherical, or cylindrical objects. This paper proposes a 3D point cloud feature identification method based on an improved PFH descriptor with a feature-level normal that can efficiently distinguish objects with smooth surfaces. Firstly, a feature-level normal is established, and then the relationship between each point’s normal and feature-level normal is calculated. Finally, the unknown feature is identified by comparing the similarity of the type-labeled feature and the unknown feature. The proposed method obtains an overall identification accuracy ranging from 71.9% to 81.9% for the identification of street lamps, trees, and buildings.