OpenTrench3D: A Photogrammetric 3D Point Cloud Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Underground Utilities

Identifying and classifying underground utilities is an important task for efficient and effective urban planning and infrastructure maintenance. We present OpenTrench3D, a novel and comprehensive 3D Semantic Segmentation point cloud dataset, designed to advance research and development in underground utility surveying and mapping. OpenTrench3D covers a completely novel domain for public 3D point cloud datasets and is unique in its focus, scope, and cost-effective capturing method. The dataset consists of 310 point clouds collected across 7 distinct areas. These include 5 water utility areas and 2 district heating utility areas. The inclusion of different geographical areas and main utilities (water and district heating utilities) makes OpenTrench3D particularly valuable for inter-domain transfer learning experiments. We provide benchmark results for the dataset using three state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models, PointNeXt, PointVector and PointMetaBase. Benchmarks are conducted by training on data from water areas, fine-tuning on district heating area 1 and evaluating on district heating area 2. The dataset is publicly available. With OpenTrench3D, we seek to foster innovation and progress in the field of 3D semantic segmentation in applications related to detection and documentation of underground utilities as well as in transfer learning methods in general.