Road marking degradation analysis using 3D point cloud data acquired with a low-cost Mobile Mapping System

Abstract

Road maintenance is an important task that ensures the availability and correct function of the road infrastructure. This work presents a methodology that, first, offers an empirical radiometric analysis of the Velodyne VLP-32C laser scanner. Second, it defines a road marking degradation model that estimates the coefficient of retroreflected luminance (night visibility, RL) using the intensity attribute of 3D point clouds acquired with this low-cost system. This model is validated and applied to a case study road section of about 6 km in length, where a continuous degradation map is defined together with data to assist decision-making for preventive and corrective maintenance. This validation shows that the proposed method is capable of offering good qualitative visualizations of the degradation status of the road markings, as well as detecting those areas with high degradation (RL< 100 mcd/m2/lx) that require corrective maintenance.