SUSTech POINTS: A Portable 3D Point Cloud Interactive Annotation Platform System

The major challenges of developing 3D point cloud annotation systems for autonomous driving datasets include convenient user-data interfaces, efficient operations on geometric data units, and scalable annotation tools. This paper presents a Portable pOint-cloud Interactive aNnotation plaTform System (i.e. SUSTech POINTS), which contains a set of user-friendly interfaces and efficient annotation tools to help achieve high-quality data annotations with high efficiency. The novelty of this work is threefold: (1) developing a set of visualization modules for fast annotation error localization and convenient annotator-data interactions; (2) developing a set of interactive tools for annotators labeling 3D point clouds and 2D images in high speed; (3) developing an annotation transfer method to label the same objects in different data frames. The developed POINTS system is tested with public datasets such as KITTI and a private dataset (SUSTech SCAPES). The experimental results show that the developed platform can help improve the annotation accuracy and efficiency compared with using other open-source annotation platforms.