H3D: Benchmark on Semantic Segmentation of High-Resolution 3D Point Clouds and textured Meshes from UAV LiDAR and Multi-View-Stereo

Automated semantic segmentation and object detection are of great importance in the domain of geospatial data analysis. However, supervised Machine Learning systems such as Convolutional Neural Networks require large corpora of annotated training data. Especially in the geospatial domain, such datasets are quite scarce. Within this paper, we aim to alleviate this issue by introducing a new annotated 3D dataset which is unique in three ways: i) The dataset consists of both an UAV Laserscanning point cloud and a derived 3D textured mesh. ii) The point cloud incorporates a mean point density of about 800 pts/sqm and the oblique imagery used for texturing the 3D mesh realizes a Ground Sampling Distance of about 2-3 cm. This enables detection of fine-grained structures and represents the state of the art in UAV-based mapping. iii) Both data modalities will be published for a total of three epochs allowing applications such as change detection. The dataset depicts the village of Hessigheim (Germany), henceforth referred to as H3D. It is designed for promoting research in the field of 3D data analysis on one hand and to evaluate and rank existing and emerging approaches for semantic segmentation of both data modalities on the other hand. Ultimatively, H3D is supposed to become a new benchmark dataset in company with the well-established ISPRS Vaihingen 3D Semantic Labeling Challenge benchmark (V3D). The dataset can be retrieved from https://ifpwww.ifp.uni-stuttgart.de/benchmark/hessigheim/default.aspx.