Siamese KPConv: 3D multiple change detection from raw point clouds using deep learning

This study is concerned with urban change detection and categorization in point clouds. In such situations, objects are mainly characterized by their vertical axis, and the use of native 3D data such as 3D Point Clouds (PCs) is, in general, preferred to rasterized versions because of significant loss of information implied by any rasterization process. Yet, for obvious practical reasons, most existing studies only focus on 2D images for change detection purpose. In this paper, we propose a method capable of performing change detection directly within 3D data. Despite recent deep learning developments in remote sensing, to the best of our knowledge there is no such method to tackle multi-class change segmentation that directly processes raw 3D PCs. Thereby, based on advances in deep learning for change detection in 2D images and for analysis of 3D point clouds, we propose a deep Siamese KPConv network that deals with raw 3D PCs to perform change detection and categorization in a single step. Experimental results are conducted on synthetic and real data of various kinds (LiDAR, multi-sensors). Tests performed on simulated low density LiDAR and multi-sensor datasets show that our proposed method can obtain up to 80% of mean of IoU over classes of changes, leading to an improvement ranging from 10% to 30% over the state-of-the-art. A similar range of improvements is attainable on real data. Then, we show that pre-training Siamese KPConv on simulated PCs allows us to greatly reduce (more than 3,000x) the annotations required on real data. This is a highly significant result to deal with practical scenarios. Finally, an adaptation of Siamese KPConv is realized to deal with change classification at PC scale. Our network overtakes the current state-of-the-art deep learning method by 23% and 15% of mean of IoU when assessed on synthetic and public Change3D datasets, respectively. The code is available at the following link: https://github.com/IdeGelis/torch-points3d-SiameseKPConv.