title: A marked point process for modeling lidar waveforms.
abstract: Lidar waveforms are 1-D signals representing a train of echoes caused by reflections at different targets. Modeling these echoes with the appropriate parametric function is useful to retrieve information about the physical characteristics of the targets. This paper presents a new probabilistic model based upon a marked point process which reconstructs the echoes from recorded discrete waveforms as a sequence of parametric curves. Such an approach allows to fit each mode of a waveform with the most suitable function and to deal with both, symmetric and asymmetric, echoes. The model takes into account a data term, which measures the coherence between the models and the waveforms, and a regularization term, which introduces prior knowledge on the reconstructed signal. The exploration of the associated configuration space is performed by a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) sampler coupled with simulated annealing. Experiments with different kinds of lidar signals, especially from urban scenes, show the high potential of the proposed approach. To further demonstrate the advantages of the suggested method, actual laser scans are classified and the results are reported.
authors.affiliation: Université Paris-Est, IGN, Saint-Mandé, France. clement.mallet@ign.fr
authors.forename: Clément
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mallet
authors.forename: Florent
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lafarge
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Roux
authors.forename: Uwe
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Soergel
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bretar
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Heipke
mesh_terms: D007089:Image Enhancement; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008390:Markov Chains; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method