Tiles of airborne laser scanning point clouds of Vienna, Austria (2016)

Airborne laser scanning of the city of Vienna, which was organized by the survey department of the City Administration of Vienna (MA41). The data acquisition was performed in eight flight missions in November 2015.

After strip adjustment relative accuracy of the point cloud was in the order of 2cm. The absolute accuracy measured as RMSE is better than 5cm in planimetry and better than 4cm in elevation. The dataset was cleaned and does not involve obvious gross errors, e.g. points high up in the air or points far below ground level. The point density is measured as by last echoes per unit area and is more than 15 points/m² for 97% of the area. The average point density is 33 points/m².

The LiDAR dataset of the city is organized in a number of 1270m×1020m tiles (including a 10m overlap of all neighboring tiles).

Reference labels were generated semi-automatically: a rough filtering of main objects was firstly conducted by the software “Terrasolid”, and the final classification was refined by manual labelling. For the purpose of Vienna city administration, five classes are considered, namely ground, buildings, vegetation, others, water and bridges. All common street objects are categorized as others, such as (e.g.) streetlights, benches, shrubs, cars, construction sites and garbage bins. The different classes are defined by the following numeric integer codes: 2: Ground, 5: Vegetation, 6: Buildings, 8: Others, 9: Water and 17: Bridges.

The quality of the labelling was manually checked. In 20 sites of 100m×100m the classification was manually verified, and the average accuracy of reference labels is 95%.

Total 9 tiles are published, in which 4 tiles were used for the training and 5 tiles for the evaluation in the paper “A Comparison of Deep Learning Methods for Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds Classification”. Their locations in the city of Vienna can be found in the file of metadata, which also provides WGS84/GRS80 latitude and longitude coordinates of the extent corners of each tile (EPSG: 31256). This can be used to  access images of the tiles from Google Maps or other public map service.