cgal/Documentation/doc/Documentation/Tutorials/Tutorial_GIS.txt

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namespace CGAL {
/*!
\example Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp
*/
/*!
\page tuto_gis GIS (Geographic Information System)
\cgalAutoToc
\author Simon Giraudot
Many sensors used in GIS applications (for example LIDAR), generate
dense point clouds. Such applications often take advantage of more
advanced data structures: for example, Triangulated Irregular Networks
(TIN) that can be the base for Digital Evelation Models (DEM) and in
particular for the generation of Digital Terrain Models (DTM). Point
clouds can also be enriched by classification information that
segments the points into ground, vegetation and building points (or
other user-defined labels).
The definitions of some data structures may vary according to
different sources. We will use the following terms within this
tutorial:
- TIN: _Triangulated Irregular Network_, a 2D triangulation structure
that connects 3D points based on their projections on the horizontal
plane.
- DSM: _Digital Surface Model_, a model of the whole scanned surface
including buildings and vegetation. We use a TIN to store the DSM.
- DTM: _Digital Terrain Model_, a model of the bare ground surface
without objects like buildings or vegetation. We both use a TIN and a
raster to store a DTM.
- DEM: _Digital Elevation Model_, a more general term that includes
both DSM and DTM.
This tutorial illustrates the following scenario. From an input point
cloud, we first compute a DSM stored as a TIN. Then, we filter out
overly large facets that correspond either to building facades or to
vegetation noise. Large components corresponding to the ground are
kept. Holes are filled and the obtained DEM is remeshed. A raster DEM
and a set of contour polylines are generated from it. Finally,
supervised 3-label classification is performed to segment vegetation,
building and group points.
\section TutorialGIS_TIN Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN)
\cgal provides several triangulation data structures and algorithms. A
TIN can be generated by combining the 2D Delaunay triangulation with
projection traits: the triangulation structure is computed using the
2D positions of the points along a selected plane (usually, the
XY-plane), while the 3D positions of the points are kept for
visualization and measurements.
A TIN data structure can thus simply be defined the following way:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp TIN DS
\section TutorialGIS_DSM Digital Surface Model (DSM)
Point clouds in many formats (XYZ, OFF, PLY, LAS) can be easily loaded
into a `CGAL::Point_set_3` structure, using the stream
operator. Generating a DSM stored in TIN is then straightforward:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Init DSM
Because the Delaunay triangulation of \cgal is a model of
`FaceGraph`, it is straightforward to convert the generated TIN into a
mesh structure such as `CGAL::Surface_mesh` and be saved into whatever
formats are supported by such structure:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Save DSM
An example of a DSM computed this way on the San Fransisco data set
(see \ref TutorialGIS_Reference) is given in
\cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigTIN}.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigTIN, tin.jpg}
Input point cloud and output DSM.
\cgalFigureEnd
\section TutorialGIS_DTM Digital Terrain Model (DTM)
The generated DSM is used as a base for DTM computation, that is a
representation of the ground as another TIN after filtering non-ground
points.
We propose, as an example, a simple DTM estimation decomposed in the
following steps:
1. Thresholding the height of the facets to remove brutal changes of
elevation
2. Clustering the other facets into connected components
3. Filtering all components smaller than a user-defined threshold
This algorithm relies on 2 parameters: a height threshold that
corresponds to the minimum height of a building, and a perimeter
threshold that corresponds to the maximum size of a building on the 2D
projection.
\subsection TutorialGIS_DTM_info TIN With Info
Because it takes advantage of the flexible \cgal Delaunay
triangulation API, our TIN can be enriched with information on
vertices and/or on faces. In our case, each vertex keeps track of the
index of the corresponding point in the input point cloud (which will
allow to filter ground points afterwards), and each face is given the
index of its connected component.
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp TIN_with_info
\subsection TutorialGIS_DTM_components Identifying Connected Components
Connected components are identified through a flooding algorithm: from
a seed face, all incident faces are inserted in the current connected
component unless their heights exceed the user-defined threshold.
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Components
This TIN enriched with connected component information can be saved as
a colored mesh:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Save TIN with info
An example of a TIN colored by connected components is
given in \cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigComponents}.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigComponents, components.jpg}
TIN colored by connected components. Faces above height threshold are
not assigned to any component and are displayed in gray.
\cgalFigureEnd
\subsection TutorialGIS_DTM_filtering Filtering
Components smaller than the largest building can be removed this way:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Filtering
\subsection Tutorial_DTM_hole_filling Hole Filling and Remeshing
Because simply removing vertices in the large areas covered by
buildings results in large Delaunay faces that offer a poor 3D
representation of the DTM, an additional step can help producing
better shaped meshes: faces larger than a threshold are removed and
filled with a hole filling algorithm that triangulates, refines and
fairs the holes.
The following snippet copies the TIN into a mesh while filtering out
overly large faces, then identifies the holes and fills them all
except for the largest one (which is the outer hull).
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Hole filling
Isotropic remeshing can also be performed as a final step in order to
produce a more regular mesh that is not constrained by the shape of 2D
Delaunay faces.
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Remeshing
\cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigProc} shows how these different steps
affect the output mesh and \cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigDTM} shows the
DTM isotropic mesh.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigProc, dtm_proc.jpg}
Raw DTM and postprocessing
\cgalFigureEnd
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigDTM, dtm.jpg}
Final DTM.
\cgalFigureEnd
\section TutorialGIS_Raster Rastering
The TIN data structure can be combined with barycentric coordinates in
order to interpolate and thus rasterize a height map at any resolution
needed the information embedded in the vertices.
Because the latest two steps (hole filling and remeshing) were
performed on a 3D mesh, the hypothesis that our DTM is a 2.5D
representation may no longer be valid. We thus first rebuild a TIN
using the vertices of the isotropic DTM mesh lastly computed.
The following snippet generates a raster image of the height in the
form of rainbow ramp PPM file (simple bitmap format):
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Rastering
An example of a raster image with a rainbow ramp representing height
is given in \cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigRastering}.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigRastering, raster.jpg}
Raster visualization of height using a rainbow ramp, ranging from
light blue for low values to dark red for high values.
\cgalFigureEnd
\section TutorialGIS_Contour Contouring
Extracting isolevels of a function defined on a TIN is another
application that can be done with \cgal. We demonstrate here how to
extract isolevels of height to build a topographic map.
\subsection TutorialGIS_Contour_Extraction Building a Contour Graph
The first step is to extract, from all faces of the triangulation, the
section of each isolevel that goes through that face, in the form of a
segment. The following functions allow to test if one isovalue does
cross a face, and to extract it then:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Contouring functions
From these functions, we can create a graph of segments to process
later into a set of polylines. To do so, we use the
[boost::adjacency_list](https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_72_0/libs/graph/doc/adjacency_list.html)
structure and keep track of a mapping from the positions of
the end points to the vertices of the graph.
The following code computes 50 isovalues evenly distributed between
the minimum and maximum heights of the point cloud and creates a graph
containing all isolevels:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Contouring extraction
\subsection TutorialGIS_Contour_Splitting Splitting Into Polylines
Once the graph is created, splitting it into polylines is easily
performed using the function \link split_graph_into_polylines()
`CGAL::split_graph_into_polylines()` \endlink:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Contouring split
This function requires a visitor which is called when starting a
polyline, when adding a point to it and when ending it. Defining such
a class is straightforward in our case:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Contouring visitor
\subsection TutorialGIS_Contour_Simplifying Simplifying
Because the output is quite noisy, users may want to simplify the
polylines. \cgal provides a polyline simplification algorithm that
guarantees that two polylines won't intersect after
simplification. This algorithm takes advantage of the
`CGAL::Constrained_triangulation_plus_2`, which embeds
polylines as a set of constraints:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp CDT
The following code simplifies the polyline set based on the squared
distance to the original polylines, stopping when no more vertex can
be removed without going farther than 4 times the average spacing.
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Contouring simplify
Examples of contours and simplifications are given in
\cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigContours}.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigContours, contours.png}
Contouring using 50 isovalues evenly spaced. Top: original contouring
using 148k vertices and simplification with a tolerance equal to the
average spacing of the input point cloud (3.4\% of the original
polyline vertices remaining). Bottom: simplification with tolerance 4
times the average spacing (1.3\% of vertices remaining) and with
tolerance 10 times the average spacing (0.9\% of vertices
remaining). Polylines are intersection-free in all cases.
\cgalFigureEnd
\section TutorialGIS_Classify Classifying
\cgal provides a package %Classification which can be used to segment a
point cloud into a user-defined label set. The state-of-the-art
classifier currently available in \cgal is the %random forest from
ETHZ. As it is a supervised classifier, a training set is needed.
The following snippet shows how to use some manually selected training
set to train a %random forest classifier and compute a classification
regularized by a graph cut algorithm:
\snippet Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp Classification
An example of training set and resulting classification is given in
\cgalFigureRef{TutorialGISFigClassif}.
\cgalFigureBegin{TutorialGISFigClassif, classif_tuto.jpg}
Top: a slice of the point cloud classified by hand. Bottom: a
classification regularized by graph cut after training on 3 manually
classified slices.
\cgalFigureEnd
\section TutorialGIS_Code Full Code Example
All the code snippets used in this tutorial can be assembled to create
a full GIS pipeline (provided the correct _includes_ are
used). We give a full code example which achieves all the steps
described in this tutorial.
\include Classification/gis_tutorial_example.cpp
\section TutorialGIS_Reference References
This tutorial is based on the following \cgal packages:
- \ref PkgTriangulation2Ref
- \ref PkgPointSet3Ref
- \ref PkgPointSetProcessing3Ref
- \ref PkgSurface_mesh
- \ref PkgBGLRef
- \ref PkgPolygonMeshProcessingRef
- \ref PkgPolylineSimplification2Ref
- \ref PkgClassificationRef
The data set used throughout this tutorial comes from the
https://www.usgs.gov/ database, licensed under the _US Government
Public Domain_.
*/
}