Fast semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds using a dense CRF with learned parameters

In this paper, we present an efficient semantic segmentation framework for indoor scenes operating on 3D point clouds. We use the results of a Random Forest Classifier to initialize the unary potentials of a densely interconnected Conditional Random Field, for which we learn the parameters for the pairwise potentials from training data. These potentials capture and model common spatial relations between class labels, which can often be observed in indoor scenes. We evaluate our approach on the popular NYU Depth datasets, for which it achieves superior results compared to the current state of the art. Exploiting parallelization and applying an efficient CRF inference method based on mean field approximation, our framework is able to process full resolution Kinect point clouds in half a second on a regular laptop, more than twice as fast as comparable methods.