From Propagation to Prediction: Point-level Uncertainty Evaluation of MLS Point Clouds under Limited Ground Truth

Abstract: Evaluating uncertainty is critical for reliable use of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds in many high-precision applications such as Scan-to-BIM, deformation analysis, and 3D modeling. However, obtaining the ground truth (GT) for evaluation is often costly and infeasible in many real-world applications. To reduce this long-standing reliance on GT in uncertainty evaluation research, this study presents a learning-based framework for MLS point clouds that integrates optimal neighborhood estimation with geometric feature extraction. Experiments on a real-world dataset show that the proposed framework is feasible and the XGBoost model delivers fully comparable accuracy to Random Forest while achieving substantially higher efficiency (about 3 times faster), providing initial evidence that geometric features can be used to predict point-level uncertainty quantified by the C2C distance. In summary, this study shows that MLS point clouds' uncertainty is learnable, offering a novel learning-based viewpoint towards uncertainty evaluation research.