LiDAR Data Classification Using Spatial Transformation and CNN

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a useful data acquisition technique, which is widely used in a variety of practical applications. The classification of LiDAR-derived rasterized digital surface model (LiDAR-DSM) is a fundamental technique in LiDAR data processing. In recent years, deep learning methods, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have shown their capability in remote sensing areas, including LiDAR data processing. Traditional deep models empirically use a fixed neighborhood system as input to the network. Therefore, the weight and height of the input rectangle may not be optimal. In order to modify such handcrafted setting, a spatial transformation network is used here to identify optimal inputs. The transformed inputs are fed into a well-designed CNN to obtain the final classification results. Furthermore, morphological profiles are combined with spatial transformation CNN to further improve the classification accuracy. The proposed frameworks are tested on two LiDAR-DSMs (i.e., the Recology and Houston data sets). The experimental results show that the proposed models provide competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the proposed optimal input identification approach can also be found beneficial for other remote sensing applications.