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Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

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Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#2
Lidars are pretty powerful, but one big disadvantage of using point clouds for perception is that they are not colored. This makes identifying objects more difficult compared to camera images. However, by combining camera images with lidar data, we can enhance the point cloud by assigning colors to the points based on the corresponding camera image pixels. This makes visualizing and processing the point cloud much easier.

Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#3
I did work on this as part of my thesis quite a few years back at the university. One other optimization would be to process the points in parallel.

Regarding the coloring of each 3d point, it might be feasible to not use one camera image, but a weighted sum of all camera images that can see the same point in the scene. Each pixel color is then weighted with the scalar product of the points normal and the viewing direction of the camera. This would also regard for noise and specular reflections (which can mess up the original color).

Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#4
Have been doing something similar to this using image to image translation (XYZ rendered images to RGB space domain). Most of the information is contained in the Z-axis which gives you the height information, e.g. helps to distinguish the grass and buildings color. However I am skeptical if the X and Y is noise and how much spatial information it provides during Conv blocks. Anyone who had previous experience on this?

https://github.com/f0ti/thesis

Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#5
post #4

Have been doing something similar to this using image to image translation (XYZ rendered images to RGB space domain). Most of the information is contained in the Z-axis which gives you the height information, e.g. helps to distinguish the grass and buildings color. However I am skeptical if the X and Y is noise and how much spatial information it provides during Conv blocks. Anyone who had previous experience on this…

As pointed out in my other comment, using a single image for point coloring is prone to errors due to noise, specular reflection and occlusion. I'd consider using a (normalized) cross-correlation approach with several images.

Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#8

Lidars are pretty powerful, but one big disadvantage of using point clouds for perception is that they are not colored. This makes identifying objects more difficult compared to camera images. However, by combining camera images with lidar data, we can enhance the point cloud by assigning colors to the points based on the corresponding camera image pixels. This makes visualizing and processing the point cloud much ea…

> one big disadvantage of using point clouds for perception is that they are not colored

That depends entirely on the capture device.

Re: Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images

#9

Lidars are expensive, if you want spare point clouds, that are not quite real time you might want to check out colmap https://colmap.github.io/

Thanks, been trying to look into AI tools to generate point clouds from photos for a hobby robot. Crazy that a mediocre LIDAR costs more than every other part of the robot combined, maybe times 10.
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