The calculation of volumes for irregular bodies holds significant relevance across various production processes. This spans tasks such as evaluating the growth status of crops and fruits, conducting morphological analyses of spatial objects based on volume parameters, and estimating quantities for earthwork and excavation. While methods like drainage, surface reconstruction, and triangulation suffice for smaller irregular bodies, larger ones introduce heightened complexity. Technological advancements, such as UAV photogrammetry and LiDAR, have introduced efficient point cloud data acquisition methods, bolstering precision and efficiency in calculating volumes for substantial irregular bodies. Notably, open-pit mines, characterized by their dynamic surface alterations, exemplify the challenges posed by large irregular bodies. Ensuring accurate excavation quantity calculations in such mines is pivotal, impacting operational considerations, acceptance, as well as production cost management and project oversight. Thus, this study employs UAV-acquired point cloud data from open-pit mines as a case study. In practice, calculating volumes for substantial irregular bodies often relies on the point cloud slicing method. However, this approach grapples with distinguishing multi-contour boundaries, leading to inaccuracies. To surmount this hurdle, this paper introduces an enhanced point cloud slicing method. The methodology involves segmenting point cloud data at fixed intervals, followed by the segmentation of slice contours using the Euclidean clustering method. Subsequently, the concave hull algorithm extracts the contour polygons of each slice. The final volume calculation involves multiplying the area of each polygon by the spacing and aggregating these products. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we employ model-derived volumes as benchmarks, comparing errors arising from both the traditional slicing method and our proposed technique. Experimental outcomes underscore the superiority of our point cloud volume calculation method, manifesting in an average relative error of 1.17%, outperforming the conventional point cloud slicing method in terms of accuracy.

With the development of remote sensing technology and the advent of high-resolution images, obtaining data has become increasingly convenient. However, the acquisition of small manhole cover information still has shortcomings including low efficiency of manual surveying and high leakage rate. Recently, deep learning models, especially deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), have proven to be effective at object detection. However, several challenges limit the applications of DCNN in manhole cover object detection using remote sensing imagery: (1) Manhole cover objects often appear at different scales in remotely sensed images and DCNNs’ fixed receptive field cannot match the scale variability of such objects; (2) Manhole cover objects in large-scale remotely-sensed images are relatively small in size and densely packed, while DCNNs have poor localization performance when applied to such objects. To address these problems, we propose an effective method for detecting manhole cover objects in remotely-sensed images. First, we redesign the feature extractor by adopting the visual geometry group (VGG), which can increase the variety of receptive field size. Then, detection is performed using two sub-networks: a multi-scale output network (MON) for manhole cover object-like edge generation from several intermediate layers whose receptive fields match different object scales and a multi-level convolution matching network (M-CMN) for object detection based on fused feature maps, which combines several feature maps that enable small and densely packed manhole cover objects to produce a stronger response. The results show that our method is more accurate than existing methods at detecting manhole covers in remotely-sensed images.

Deep learning techniques have greatly improved the efficiency and accuracy of building extraction using remote sensing images. However, high-quality building outline extraction results that can be applied to the field of surveying and mapping remain a significant challenge. In practice, most building extraction tasks are manually executed. Therefore, an automated procedure of a building outline with a precise position is required. In this study, we directly used the U²-net semantic segmentation model to extract the building outline. The extraction results showed that the U²-net model can provide the building outline with better accuracy and a more precise position than other models based on comparisons with semantic segmentation models (Segnet, U-Net, and FCN) and edge detection models (RCF, HED, and DexiNed) applied for two datasets (Nanjing and Wuhan University (WHU)). We also modified the binary cross-entropy loss function in the U²-net model into a multiclass cross-entropy loss function to directly generate the binary map with the building outline and background. We achieved a further refined outline of the building, thus showing that with the modified U²-net model, it is not necessary to use non-maximum suppression as a post-processing step, as in the other edge detection models, to refine the edge map. Moreover, the modified model is less affected by the sample imbalance problem. Finally, we created an image-to-image program to further validate the modified U²-net semantic segmentation model for building outline extraction.

Indoor positioning data reflects human mobility in indoor spaces. Revealing patterns of indoor trajectories may help us understand human indoor mobility. Clustering methods, which are based on the measurement of similarity between trajectories, are important tools for identifying those patterns. However, due to the specific characteristics of indoor trajectory data, it is difficult for clustering methods to measure the similarity between trajectories. These characteristics are manifested in two aspects. The first is that the nodes of trajectories may have clear semantic attributes; for example, in a shopping mall, the node of a trajectory may contain information such as the store type and visit duration time, which may imply a customer’s interest in certain brands. The semantic information can only be obtained when the position precision is sufficiently high so that the relationship between the customer and the store can be determined, which is difficult to realize for outdoor positioning, either using GPS or mobile base station, due to the relatively large positioning error. If the tendencies of customers are to be considered, the similarity of geometrical morphology does not reflect the real similarity between trajectories. The second characteristic is the complex spatial shapes of indoor trajectory caused by indoor environments, which include elements such as closed spaces, multiple obstacles and longitudinal extensions. To deal with these challenges caused by indoor trajectories, in this article we proposed a new method called E-DBSCAN, which extended DBSCAN to trajectory clustering of indoor positioning data. First, the indoor location data were transformed into a sequence of residence points with rich semantic information, such as the type of store customer visited, stay time and spatial location of store. Second, a Weighted Edit Distance algorithm was proposed to measure the similarity of the trajectories. Then, an experiment was conducted to verify the correctness of E-DBSCAN using five days of positioning data in a shopping mall, and five shopping behavior patterns were identified and potential explanations were proposed. In addition, a comparison was conducted among E-DBSCAN, the k-means and DBSCAN algorithms. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can discover customers’ behavioral pattern in indoor environments effectively.

People spend more than 80% of their time in indoor spaces, such as shopping malls and office buildings. Indoor trajectories collected by indoor positioning devices, such as WiFi and Bluetooth devices, can reflect human movement behaviors in indoor spaces. Insightful indoor movement patterns can be discovered from indoor trajectories using various clustering methods. These methods are based on a measure that reflects the degree of similarity between indoor trajectories. Researchers have proposed many trajectory similarity measures. However, existing trajectory similarity measures ignore the indoor movement constraints imposed by the indoor space and the characteristics of indoor positioning sensors, which leads to an inaccurate measure of indoor trajectory similarity. Additionally, most of these works focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions of trajectories and pay less attention to indoor semantic information. Integrating indoor semantic information such as the indoor point of interest into the indoor trajectory similarity measurement is beneficial to discovering pedestrians having similar intentions. In this paper, we propose an accurate and reasonable indoor trajectory similarity measure called the indoor semantic trajectory similarity measure (ISTSM), which considers the features of indoor trajectories and indoor semantic information simultaneously. The ISTSM is modified from the edit distance that is a measure of the distance between string sequences. The key component of the ISTSM is an indoor navigation graph that is transformed from an indoor floor plan representing the indoor space for computing accurate indoor walking distances. The indoor walking distances and indoor semantic information are fused into the edit distance seamlessly. The ISTSM is evaluated using a synthetic dataset and real dataset for a shopping mall. The experiment with the synthetic dataset reveals that the ISTSM is more accurate and reasonable than three other popular trajectory similarities, namely the longest common subsequence (LCSS), edit distance on real sequence (EDR), and the multidimensional similarity measure (MSM). The case study of a shopping mall shows that the ISTSM effectively reveals customer movement patterns of indoor customers.