Abstract
Abstract. Pavement markings serve as important traffic control devices, delineating traffic lanes and conveying regulations, guidance or warnings to roadway users. To ensure that pavement markings are clearly visible, especially at night, transportation agencies periodically assess the retroreflectivity of various categories of markings through manual approaches at discrete location. Because the radiometric information such as intensity in the lidar data cannot inherently be considered as a retroreflectivity measurement without additional processing, this study rigorously assesses the ability to determine pavement marking retroreflectivity from the Leica ScanStation P40 through radiometric calibration. For the evaluation, data were collected at a study site in Philomath, Oregon using the Leica P40, Leica Pegasus: Two mobile lidar system, and a handheld retroreflectometer as a reference. The results show that, with appropriate calibration, the lidar data can adequately assess the retroreflectivity of pavement markings. Additionally, while corrections have been proposed for range and angle of incidence, these corrections are not straightforward to apply for retroreflective materials, as will be discussed herein. While mobile lidar technology is ideal for a system-wide asset management framework, terrestrial laser scanning can be utilized for detailed investigations at sites such as intersections with highly variable wear where both can enable significant cost savings and applied for a variety of purposes simultaneously including asset management and project development.
Highlights
Pavement markings serve as important traffic control devices, delineating traffic lanes and conveying regulations, guidance or warnings to roadway users
To ensure that pavement markings are clearly visible, especially at night, transportation agencies periodically assess the retroreflectivity of various categories of markings in accordance with the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), Section 3A.03
As many state transportation agencies are already collecting mobile lidar data for a variety of other purposes (Olsen et al 2013), including asset management and project development, significant cost savings could be enabled by using the lidar data to simultaneously assess pavement marking retroreflectivity
Summary
Pavement markings serve as important traffic control devices, delineating traffic lanes and conveying regulations, guidance or warnings to roadway users. Kashani et al (2015) provide an overview of approaches for intensity normalization (making intensity values consistent between adjacent flight lines or scans), intensity correction (applying a correction based on parameters such as range), and radiometric calibration (performing a rigorous calibration to objects of known reflectance) Most work in this realm focuses on airborne laser scanning; studies are increasingly focusing on mobile and terrestrial laser scanning (MLS and TLS). Zhang et al (2016) developed an intensity correction based on a linear regression of the cosine of the scan angle rank versus intensity to improve its consistency as a relative measure for comparing road markings Their primary focus in developing this correlation is to utilize this information for improving the road marking extraction algorithm results. While few studies have focused on using lidar data for pavement marking retroreflectivity evaluation, several studies have utilized intensity information for road marking extraction (e.g., Guan et al 2016, Zhang et al 2016, Jung et al 2019) or to serve as a reference for improved geo-referencing (e.g., Toth et al 2008)
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