LASDU: A large-scale aerial LiDAR dataset for semantic labeling in dense urban areas

The semantic labeling of the urban area is an essential but challenging task for a wide variety of applications such as mapping, navigation, and monitoring. The rapid advance in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems provides this task with a possible solution using 3D point clouds, which are accessible, affordable, accurate, and applicable. Among all types of platforms, the airborne platform with LiDAR can serve as an efficient and effective tool for large-scale 3D mapping in the urban area. Against this background, a large number of algorithms and methods have been developed to fully explore the potential of 3D point clouds. However, the creation of publicly accessible large-scale annotated datasets, which are critical for assessing the performance of the developed algorithms and methods, is still at an early age. In this work, we present a large-scale aerial LiDAR point cloud dataset acquired in a highly-dense and complex urban area for the evaluation of semantic labeling methods. This dataset covers an urban area with highly-dense buildings of approximately 1 km² and includes more than three million points with five classes of objects labeled. Moreover, experiments are carried out with the results from several baseline methods, demonstrating the feasibility and capability of the dataset serving as a benchmark for assessing semantic labeling methods.