Dense 3D visual mapping estimates as many as possible pixel depths, for each image. This results in very dense point clouds that often contain redundant and noisy information, especially for surfaces that are roughly planar, for instance, the ground or the walls in the scene. In this paper we leverage on semantic image segmentation to discriminate which regions of the scene require simplification and which should be kept at high level of details. We propose four different point cloud simplification methods which decimate the perceived point cloud by relying on class-specific local and global statistics still maintaining more points in the proximity of class boundaries to preserve the infra-class edges and discontinuities. 3D dense model is obtained by fusing the point clouds in a 3D Delaunay Triangulation to deal with variable point cloud density. In the experimental evaluation we have shown that, by leveraging on semantics, it is possible to simplify the model and diminish the noise affecting the point clouds.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) are used extensively in biomedical image segmentation. However, current DCNNs usually use down sampling layers for increasing the receptive field and gaining abstract semantic information. These down sampling layers decrease the spatial dimension of feature maps, which can be detrimental to semantic image segmentation. Atrous convolution is an alternative for the down sampling layer. It increases the receptive field whilst maintains the spatial dimension of feature maps. In this paper, a method for effective atrous rate setting is proposed to achieve the largest and fully-covered receptive field with a minimum number of atrous convolutional layers. Furthermore, different atrous blocks, shortcut connections and normalization methods are explored to select the optimal network structure setting. These lead to a new and full-scale DCNN - Atrous Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN), which incorporates cascaded atrous II-blocks, residual learning and Fine Group Normalization (FGN). Application results of the proposed ACNN to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) image segmentation demonstrate that the proposed ACNN can achieve comparable segmentation Dice Similarity Coefficients (DSCs) to U-Net, optimized U-Net and hybrid network, but with significantly reduced trainable parameters due to the use of full-scale feature maps and therefore computationally is much more efficient for both the training and inference.