[HN Gopher] Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images
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       Colorize Lidar point clouds with camera images
        
       Author : shikhardevgupta
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2024-08-17 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
        
       | shikhardevgupta wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | polemic wrote:
         | > _one big disadvantage of using point clouds for perception is
         | that they are not colored_
         | 
         | That depends entirely on the capture device.
        
         | Groxx wrote:
         | I'm not sure why you've just restated the first paragraph of
         | the article.
        
           | outofpaper wrote:
           | Likely for the engagement... any bets as to if they are a bot
           | or not?
        
         | PabloRobles wrote:
         | Shameless plug, but I work on a multispectral lidar that does
         | produce "colored" point clouds in the SWIR [0].
         | 
         | It is pretty cool, we use it for detection of humidity degree
         | or for species discrimination (e.g. plants, minerals,
         | chemicals...).
         | 
         | [0]: https://www.iridesense.tech/
        
       | W0lf wrote:
       | 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).
        
       | f0ti wrote:
       | 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
        
         | W0lf wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | wsitch wrote:
       | Check out https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OjyxFGmcu74
        
       | KaiserPro wrote:
       | 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/
        
         | ghayes wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | crtified wrote:
       | Would an accurate ELI5 of this be :
       | 
       | * Mathematically align the photograph and the lidar point cloud.
       | 
       | * For each photograph pixel, colour whichever aligned lidar point
       | is closest to the camera.
       | 
       | So you end up with one coloured lidar point per photograph pixel?
        
       | stargrazer wrote:
       | Isn't there some math which crosses over between what Lidar is
       | showing vs what photogrammetry provides from overlapping
       | photograph images -> providing depth corrected/adjusted/ground-
       | truthing of images?
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-17 23:00 UTC)