Delaunay Triangulation-Based Spatial Clustering Technique for Enhanced Adjacent Boundary Detection and Segmentation of LiDAR 3D Point Clouds

Abstract

In spatial data with complexity, different clusters can be very contiguous, and the density of each cluster can be arbitrary and uneven. In addition, background noise that does not belong to any clusters in the data, or chain noise that connects multiple clusters may be included. This makes it difficult to separate clusters in contact with adjacent clusters, so a new approach is required to solve the nonlinear shape, irregular density, and touching problems of adjacent clusters that are common in complex spatial data clustering, as well as to improve robustness against various types of noise in spatial clusters. Accordingly, we proposed an efficient graph-based spatial clustering technique that employs Delaunay triangulation and the mechanism of DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise). In the performance evaluation using simulated synthetic data as well as real 3D point clouds, the proposed method maintained better clustering and separability of neighboring clusters compared to other clustering techniques, and is expected to be of practical use in the field of spatial data mining.