An intensity-enhanced method for handling mobile laser scanning point clouds

Abstract

Currently, mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems can conveniently and rapidly measure the backscattered laser beam properties of the object surfaces in large-scale roadway scenes. Such properties is digitalized as the intensity value stored in the acquired point cloud data, and the intensity as an important information source has been widely used in a variety of applications, including road marking inventory, manhole cover detection, and pavement inspection. However, the collected intensity is often deviated from the object reflectance due to two main factors, i.e. different scanning distances and worn-out surfaces. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new intensity-enhanced method to gradually and efficiently achieve the intensity enhancement in the MLS point clouds. Concretely, to eliminate the intensity inconsistency caused by different scanning distances, the direct relationship between scanning distance and intensity value is modeled to correct the inconsistent intensity. To handle the low contrast between 3D points with different intensities, we proposed to introduce and adapt the dark channel prior for adaptively transforming the intensity information in point cloud scenes. To remove the isolated intensity noises, multiple filters are integrated to achieve the denoising in the regions with different point densities. The evaluations of our proposed method are conducted on four MLS datasets, which are acquired at different road scenarios with different MLS systems. Extensive experiments and discussions demonstrate that the proposed method can exhibit the remarkable performance on enhancing the intensities in MLS point clouds.