Point cloud semantic segmentation in urban scenes plays a vital role in intelligent city modeling, autonomous driving, and urban planning. Point cloud semantic segmentation based on deep learning methods has achieved significant improvement. However, it is also challenging for accurate semantic segmentation in large scenes due to complex elements, variety of scene classes, occlusions, and noise. Besides, most methods need to split the original point cloud into multiple blocks before processing and cannot directly deal with the point clouds on a large scale. We propose a novel context-aware network (CAN) that can directly deal with large-scale point clouds. In the proposed network, a local feature aggregation module (LFAM) is designed to preserve rich geometric details in the raw point cloud and reduce the information loss during feature extraction. Then, in combination with a global context aggregation module (GCAM), capture long-range dependencies to enhance the network feature representation and suppress the noise. Finally, a context-aware upsampling module (CAUM) is embedded into the proposed network to capture the global perception from a broad perspective. The ensemble of low-level and high-level features facilitates the effectiveness and efficiency of 3-D point cloud feature refinement. Comprehensive experiments were carried out on three large-scale point cloud datasets in both outdoor and indoor environments to evaluate the performance of the proposed network. The results show that the proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art representative semantic segmentation networks, and the overall accuracy (OA) of Tongji-3D, Semantic3D, and Stanford large-scale 3-D indoor spaces (S3DIS) is 96.01%, 95.0%, and 88.55%, respectively.

Urban land cover classification for high-resolution images is a fundamental yet challenging task in remote sensing image analysis. Recently, deep learning techniques have achieved outstanding performance in high-resolution image classification, especially the methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). However, the traditional CNNs using convolution operations with local receptive fields are not sufficient to model global contextual relations between objects. In addition, multiscale objects and the relatively small sample size in remote sensing have also limited classification accuracy. In this paper, a relation-enhanced multiscale convolutional network (REMSNet) method is proposed to overcome these weaknesses. A dense connectivity pattern and parallel multi-kernel convolution are combined to build a lightweight and varied receptive field sizes model. Then, the spatial relation-enhanced block and the channel relation-enhanced block are introduced into the network. They can adaptively learn global contextual relations between any two positions or feature maps to enhance feature representations. Moreover, we design a parallel multi-kernel deconvolution module and spatial path to further aggregate different scales information. The proposed network is used for urban land cover classification against two datasets: the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling contest of Vaihingen and an area of Shanghai of about 143 km². The results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively capture long-range dependencies and improve the accuracy of land cover classification. Our model obtains an overall accuracy (OA) of 90.46% and a mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of 0.8073 for Vaihingen and an OA of 88.55% and a mIoU of 0.7394 for Shanghai.

Image matching forms an essential means of data association for computer vision, photogrammetry and remote sensing. The quality of image matching is heavily dependent on image details and naturalness. However, complex illuminations, denoting extreme and changing illuminations, are inevitable in real scenarios, and seriously deteriorate image matching performance due to their significant influence on the image naturalness and details. In this paper, a spatial-frequency domain associated image-optimization method, comprising two main models, is specially designed for improving image matching with complex illuminations. First, an adaptive luminance equalization is implemented in the spatial domain to reduce radiometric variations, instead of removing all illumination components. Second, a frequency domain analysis-based feature-enhancement model is proposed to enhance image features while preserving image naturalness and restraining over-enhancement. The proposed method associates the advantages of the spatial and frequency domain analyses to complete illumination equalization, feature enhancement and naturalness preservation, and thus acquiring the optimized images that are robust to the complex illuminations. More importantly, our method is generic and can be embedded in most image-matching schemes to improve image matching. The proposed method was evaluated on two different datasets and compared with four other state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms other methods under complex illuminations, in both matching performances and practical applications such as structure from motion and multi-view stereo.