This work proposes a new segmentation algorithm for three-dimensional dense point clouds and has been
specially designed for natural environments where the ground is unstructured and may include big slopes, non-flat areas and
isolated areas. This technique is based on a Geometric-Featured Voxel map (GFV) where the scene is discretized in
constant size cubes or voxels which are classified in flat surface, linear or tubular structures and scattered or undefined
shapes, usually corresponding to vegetation. Since this is not a point-based technique the computational cost is significantly
reduced, hence it may be compatible with Real-Time applications. The ground is extracted in order to obtain more accurate
results in the posterior segmentation process. The scene is split into objects and a second segmentation in regions inside
each object is performed based on the voxel’s geometric class. The work here evaluates the proposed algorithm in various
versions and several voxel sizes and compares the results with other methods from the literature. For the segmentation
evaluation the algorithms are tested on several differently challenging hand-labeled data sets using two metrics, one of which
is novel.
