Airborne laser scanning (ALS) point cloud has been widely used in the fields of ground powerline surveying, forest monitoring, urban modeling, and so on because of the great convenience it brings to people’s daily life. However, the sparsity and uneven distribution of point clouds increases the difficulty of setting uniform parameters for semantic classification. The PointNet++ network is an end-to-end learning network for irregular point data and highly robust to small perturbations of input points along with corruption. It eliminates the need to calculate costly handcrafted features and provides a new paradigm for 3D understanding. However, each local region in the output is abstracted by its centroid and local feature that encodes the centroid’s neighborhood. The feature learned on the centroid point may not contain relevant information of itself for random sampling, especially in large-scale neighborhood balls. Moreover, the centroid point’s global-level information in each sample layer is also not marked. Therefore, this study proposed a modified PointNet++ network architecture which concentrates the point-level and global features on the centroid point towards the local features to facilitate classification. The proposed approach also utilizes a modified Focal Loss function to solve the extremely uneven category distribution on ALS point clouds. An elevation- and distance-based interpolation method is also proposed for the objects in ALS point clouds which exhibit discrepancies in elevation distributions. The experiments on the Vaihingen dataset of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and the GML(B) 3D dataset demonstrate that the proposed method which provides additional contextual information to support classification achieves high accuracy with simple discriminative models and new state-of-the-art performance in power line categories.

Accurate PM2.5 concentration prediction is crucial for protecting public health and improving air quality. As a popular deep learning model, deep belief network (DBN) for PM2.5 concentration prediction has received increasing attention due to its effectiveness. However, the DBN structure parameters that have a significant impact on prediction accuracy and computation time are hard to be determined. To address this issue, a modified grey wolf optimization (MGWO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the DBN structure parameters containing number of hidden nodes, learning rate, and momentum coefficient. The methodology modifies the basic grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm using the nonlinear convergence and position update strategies, and then utilizes the training error of the DBN to calculate the fitness function of the MGWO algorithm. Through the multiple iterations, the optimal structure parameters are obtained, and a suitable predictor is finally generated. The proposed prediction model is validated on a real application case. Compared with the other prediction models, experimental results show that the proposed model has a simpler structure but higher prediction accuracy.

Deep learning in 3-D classification tasks focuses on the designs of comprehensive local aggregation operators. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds have their own characteristics: 1) the object overlaps in the vertical direction; 2) the spatial density is uneven; and 3) the objects present large-scale variations between different categories. However, the dynamic graph convolutional neural network (DGCNN) ignores the inherent properties of ALS point clouds. This study modifies the DGCNN network and proposes a new neural network module called Webconv, which densely connects point pairs in multiscale local regions to learn contextual information. One modified cross entropy loss function with variable weight is proposed to solve the problem of uneven category distributions in ALS points. Because preprocessing such as block partition ignores the context information of the whole region, the conditional random field is used to refine the point cloud. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the dataset of the 2019 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest 3-D Point Cloud Classification Challenge and can be widely used for ALS point classification.

Instabilities in observed environments at sea, such as the sudden appearance of fog, varying temperature or pressure, changes in wind speed and direction, and differential gravitational and magnetic fields in each observed station, will lead to fluctuating observations and difficult data processing. These factors must be considered to achieve high-precision leveling. Therefore, a sea-crossing trigonometric leveling method that satisfies the national second-order leveling accuracy is proposed according to the sources and variable characteristics of errors under the condition of lacking corresponding specifications. The procedure is described and a mathematical model is deduced in this paper. A sea-crossing leveling engineering work is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The result of engineering work indicates that the proposed method can lighten the surveyor workload and improve the precision of final values to some extent compared with common trigonometric leveling methods. The method can be used in applications in which two benchmarks are far and mounting a level in the middle place is impossible, such as leveling across rivers, canyons, seas, or dense woods.

1. Airborne LiDAR Scanning (ALS) point cloud semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in the field of remote sensing and photogrammetry. Compared with the indoor scenes or street scenes, the ALS ...