1. Introduction
Water-conveyance tunnels are the main structures of water-diversion projects. When water-diversion projects enter the operational period, special attention must be paid to the health status of water-conveyance tunnels. The regular inspection of water-conveyance tunnels is an important means of ensuring their safe operation and health management. In recent years, in terms of the problem of tunnel-damage detection, researchers have proposed many methods and technologies (e.g., side-scan sonar, multi-beam sonar, and synthetic-aperture sonar) [
1,
2,
3,
4]. The detection method of tunnel damage based on the principle of pulse reflection forms an acoustic point-cloud model by sampling the reflected echo, and then detects and identifies the damage through acoustic point-cloud data [
5]. However, affected by the noise of tunnel environments and inspection systems, as well as the noise of carrier equipment (robot carriers and submersibles, etc.), the raw acoustic point-cloud models obtained from these methods inevitably suffer from noise, which makes it difficult to obtain useful information and increases the fuzziness and randomness of information features. In this case, the detection methods that rely on information features produce erroneous results very easily. Therefore, a filtering operation must be performed on the raw acoustic point-cloud model of the tunnel before further processing (e.g., object recognition [
6,
7] or 3D reconstruction [
8]).
Inspired by the excellent results of the guided image-filtering algorithm introduced by He et al. [
9], the classical sharpness enhancement technique of unsharp masking [
10,
11,
12] and the edge-aware weighted guided image-filtering algorithm [
13], this study extends these effective methods to the point-cloud model of tunnel and proposes a new filtering method, called unsharp-mask-guided filtering for acoustic point-cloud of water-conveyance tunnel, by considering the position of the point instead of the pixel value. The experimental results show that our method can outperform several competing methods (e.g., bilateral filter [
14], moving least-squares filter [
15], and guided 3D point-cloud filter [
16]), both on the acoustic point-cloud tunnel model and the simulated point-cloud model.
The contributions of our work can be summarized as follows: (1) the idea of guided filtering and the unsharp masking technique are fused to design a novel filtering approach for an acoustic point cloud for water-conveyance tunnels; (2) the idea of edge-aware weighting is used to retain the features while smoothing some of the edges of the point cloud; (3) a comprehensively experimental evaluation between our method and several competing denoising methods is conducted on the tunnel point-cloud model and simulated point-cloud model, respectively.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. A brief overview of the background and related work is given in
Section 2.
Section 3 describes the principle and implementation process of our proposed algorithm in detail. The experimental process and experimental results on different point-cloud models are demonstrated in
Section 4. Conclusions and discussions are presented in
Section 5.
3. Method
Our approach is motivated by the classical sharpness-enhancement techniques of unsharp masking, guided image filtering, and edge-aware weighted guided image filtering. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to 3D point clouds because some point cloud models have only spatial information, and no intensity-attribute information. Therefore, we construct a new widely applicated filtering method by using the position information of points to replace the pixel value in three classical image-filtering methods above. The block diagram of proposed method is shown in
Figure 1.
Given target point-cloud set
and guidance point-cloud set
, the neighborhood
and
are searched by using the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) method, where
and
represent the
th neighboring point of
and
, respectively. As mentioned before, we also assume that the filtered output point cloud has a linear model with the guidance point cloud in a particular neighborhood, that is,
Here,
represents the filtered output point of
.
and
are the conversion coefficients in the neighborhood
. As with Equation (2) and its optimization solution, we can obtain the values of
and
by
where
represents the number of points in
.
is a regularization parameter penalizing large
.
and
are the mean and variance of guidance point
in
.
is the mean of
in
. Taking the calculation of
in
as an example, it is given by
The filtered output point can be obtained by Equation (7). However, the output point
has different values because
may be contained in different neighborhoods. Therefore, we calculate the filtered point
by averaging all possible values of
with
where
represents the number of neighborhoods which containing point
.
Motivated by unsharp masking, summarized in Equation (6), we insert Equation (9) into Equation (11) to eliminate
, and obtain
where
,
, and
.
According to Equation (12), we can more intuitively understand how the unsharp mask guiled filtering achieves edge-preservation and structure-transferring effects. Specifically, the point is smoothed to remove noise and the result is denoted by . Next, to retain the fine details, an unsharp mask with fine features generated from the guide point cloud is added to under the control of the coefficient , enabling the transfer of edge details from the guide point cloud to the filtered-output point cloud.
However, it is clearly visible from Equation (12) that the denoising effect is greatly affected by the number of k-neighborhood points, which determines the values of , , and . If the value of is too large, the resulting point cloud usually loses sharp edges, resulting in over-smoothing problem. Furthermore, if the value of is too small, it cannot achieve the desired denoising effect.
Inspired by the edge-aware weighted guided image-filtering method [
13], we introduce the edge-aware mechanism to reduce the impact of edge loss. We use
to replace
in Equation (8), and
is given by
where
is a regularization parameter that penalizes large
.
is a small constant and its value is empirically set as
, while
is the farthest Euclidean distance between two points in the point-cloud model.
is the number of points in the point-cloud model.
represents the variance of the point in its k-nearest neighbors and the value of
here is selected as 10. When the point is located at a sharp edge, the value of
is usually lager than 1 and
becomes small. That is, the punishment for
in Equation (8) is small and
in Equation (12), it is large. Therefore, the fine edge features generated from the guidance point cloud can be maintained well while smoothing noise points.
The results of unsharp mask guided filtering are directly related to the selection of the guidance point-cloud model. Ideally, the ground-truth model without noise should be chosen as the guidance point-cloud model, but this may not be obtained in practical applications. Therefore, we use the raw noisy point cloud as the guidance point cloud. Compared with classical guided filtering, which needs to calculate two parameters , our novel filtering method needs to estimate only one coefficient . At the same time, it can maintain the edge features while smoothing the point-cloud model.
5. Conclusions and Discussion
To address the safety-monitoring problem of a water-conveyance tunnel during the operation stage, we proposed a novel filtering method, called unsharp-mask-guided filtering for 3D point cloud, to reduce the impact of noise on the point-cloud model of the water-conveyance tunnel. The proposed method fuses the ideas of classical guided filtering and the unsharp masking technique and extends them to the 3D point-cloud model by considering the position of the point. In addition, an edge-aware weighting idea was also used to retain the edge features of the point-cloud model while smoothing the noise points.
In the experiment, we examined the influence of two key parameters on the experimental results. We also carried out experiments on real-world 3D models of the tunnel and nine simulated 3D models to compare our algorithm with some state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method can outperform several competing methods, both on the real-tunnel point-cloud model and simulated point-cloud models. The model provides greater accuracy for the further processing of point clouds. However, we did not consider the efficiency of our algorithm in the experiment. Because our method needs to search the neighborhood twice for each point and to judge the inclusion relationship between the neighborhoods of different points, it does not have an obvious advantage in efficiency. The running time of point-cloud models with different number of points is different. Taking the Stanford rabbit model as an example, the time cost of our algorithm on the hardware device based on this study is 7.2 s, while the time costs of bilateral filtering, MLS filtering, and guidance filtering are 4.5 s, 4.8 s, and 3.7 s, respectively. These time costs are all higher than those in the references because of the weak processing power of the computer equipment used in this study. Therefore, we need to optimize the calculation method to improve the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in future work.