Classification of Terrain Roughness from Nationwide Data Sources Using Deep Learning

Abstract: 3D semantic segmentation is an expanding topic within the field of computer vision, which has received more attention in recent years due to the development of more powerful GPUs and the newpossibilities offered by deep learning techniques. Simultaneously, the amount of available spatial LiDAR data over Sweden has also increased. This work combines these two advances and investigates if a 3D deep learning model for semantic segmentation can learn to detect terrain roughness in airborne LiDAR data. The annotations for terrain roughness used in this work are taken from SGUs 2D soil type map. Other airborne data sources are also used to filter the annotations and see if additional information can boost the performance of the model.  Since this is the first known attempt at terrain roughness classification from 3D data, an initial test was performed where fields were classified. This ensured that the model could process airborne LiDAR data and work for a terrain classification task. The classification of fields showed very promising results without any fine-tuning. The results for the terrain roughness classification task show that the model could find a pattern in the validation data but had difficulty generalizing it to the test data. The filtering methods tested gave an increased mIoU and indicated that better annotations might be necessary to distinguish terrain roughness from other terrain types. None of the features obtained from the other data sources improved the results and showed no discriminating abilities when examining their individual histograms. In the end, more research is needed to determine whether terrain roughness can be detected from LiDAR data or not.