Review of 3D Point Cloud Data Segmentation Methods

3D point cloud segmentation is one of the key steps in point cloud processing, which is the technology and process of dividing the point cloud data set into several specific regions with unique properties and proposing interesting targets. It has important applications in medical image processing, industrial inspection, cultural relic’s identification and 3D visualization. Despite widespread use, point cloud segmentation still faces many challenges because of uneven sampling density, high redundancy, and lack explicit structure of point cloud data. The main goal of this paper is to analyse the most popular algorithms and methodologies to segment point clouds. To facilitate analysis and summary, according to the principle of segmentation we divide the 3D point cloud segmentation methods into edge-based methods, region-based methods, graph-based methods, model-based methods, and machine learning-based methods. Then analyze and discuss the advantages, disadvantages and application scenarios of these segmentation methods. For some algorithms the results of the segmentation and classification is shown. Finally, we outline the issues that need to be addressed and important future research directions.