Mobile Laser Scanning Data Research Articles

Street-side vehicle detection, classification and change detection using mobile laser scanning data

Statistics on street-side car parks, e.g. occupancy rates, parked vehicle types, parking durations, are of great importance for urban planning and policy making. Related studies, e.g. vehicle detection and classification, mostly focus on static images or video. Whereas mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems are increasingly utilized for urban street environment perception due to their direct 3D information acquisition, high accuracy and movability. In this paper, we design a complete system for car park monitoring, including vehicle recognition, localization, classification and change detection, from laser scanning point clouds. The experimental data are acquired by an MLS system using high frequency laser scanner which scans the streets vertically along the system’s moving trajectory. The point clouds are firstly classified as ground, building façade, and street objects which are then segmented using state-of-the-art methods. Each segment is treated as an object hypothesis, and its geometric features are extracted. Moreover, a deformable vehicle model is fitted to each object. By fitting an explicit model to the vehicle points, detailed information, such as precise position and orientation, can be obtained. The model parameters are also treated as vehicle features. Together with the geometric features, they are applied to a supervised learning procedure for vehicle or non-vehicle recognition. The classes of detected vehicles are also investigated. Whether vehicles have changed across two datasets acquired at different times is detected to estimate the durations. Here, vehicles are trained pair-wisely. Two same or different vehicles are paired up as training samples. As a result, the vehicle recognition, classification and change detection accuracies are 95.9%, 86.0% and 98.7%, respectively. Vehicle modelling improves not only the recognition rate, but also the localization precision compared to bounding boxes.

Calibration and Accuracy Analysis of a Low-Cost Mapping-Grade Mobile Laser Scanning System

The calibration and accuracy analysis of a novel, low-cost, adaptable mobile laser scanning (MLS) system using a Velodyne HDL-32E laser scanner and an Oxford Technical Solutions Inertial+2 inertial navigation system, is described. First, a static calibration of the laser scanner is discussed. The static calibration is shown to improve the overall relative accuracy of point cloud data from the scanner by approximately 20% over the manufacturer-supplied calibration. Then, the determination of system boresight angles and lever-arm offsets using a planar patch least-squares approach is presented. Finally, the calibrated and boresighted MLS is operated in a backpack mode to acquire multiple data sets in an area that contains dense ground control acquired using static terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and a high-end, survey-grade MLS. The dense ground control is used to examine several methods of estimating the overall errors of the backpack MLS system. Detailed comparison of the MLS data with the TLS and survey-grade MLS control shows that, despite the system’s low cost, it is able to reliably collect point cloud data with greater than 10-cm three-dimensional root-mean-square error accuracy.

Bag-of-visual-phrases and hierarchical deep models for traffic sign detection and recognition in mobile laser scanning data

This paper presents a novel algorithm for detection and recognition of traffic signs in mobile laser scanning (MLS) data for intelligent transportation-related applications. The traffic sign detection task is accomplished based on 3-D point clouds by using bag-of-visual-phrases representations; whereas the recognition task is achieved based on 2-D images by using a Gaussian-Bernoulli deep Boltzmann machine-based hierarchical classifier. To exploit high-order feature encodings of feature regions, a deep Boltzmann machine-based feature encoder is constructed. For detecting traffic signs in 3-D point clouds, the proposed algorithm achieves an average recall, precision, quality, and F-score of 0.956, 0.946, 0.907, and 0.951, respectively, on the four selected MLS datasets. For on-image traffic sign recognition, a recognition accuracy of 97.54% is achieved by using the proposed hierarchical classifier. Comparative studies with the existing traffic sign detection and recognition methods demonstrate that our algorithm obtains promising, reliable, and high performance in both detecting traffic signs in 3-D point clouds and recognizing traffic signs on 2-D images.

Spatial-Related Traffic Sign Inspection for Inventory Purposes Using Mobile Laser Scanning Data

This paper presents a spatial-related traffic sign inspection process for sign type, position, and placement using mobile laser scanning (MLS) data acquired by a RIEGL VMX-450 system and presents its potential for traffic sign inventory applications. First, the paper describes an algorithm for traffic sign detection in complicated road scenes based on the retroreflectivity properties of traffic signs in MLS point clouds. Then, a point cloud-to-image registration process is proposed to project the traffic sign point clouds onto a 2-D image plane. Third, based on the extracted traffic sign points, we propose a traffic sign position and placement inspection process by creating geospatial relations between the traffic signs and road environment. For further inventory applications, we acquire several spatial-related inventory measurements. Finally, a traffic sign recognition process is conducted to assign sign type. With the acquired sign type, position, and placement data, a spatial-associated sign network is built. Experimental results indicate satisfactory performance of the proposed detection, recognition, position, and placement inspection algorithms. The experimental results also prove the potential of MLS data for automatic traffic sign inventory applications.

Automatic Segmentation and Shape-Based Classification of Retro-Reflective Traffic Signs from Mobile LiDAR Data

Recently, many studies have demonstrated the valid contribution of mobile laser scanning to road safety improvements, thus intense efforts have been made to implement automatic data processing using laser scanning data, with special emphasis on road object recognition. This study is focused on the detection and classification of retro-reflective vertical traffic signs according to their function (danger, give way, prohibition/obligation, and indication) from mobile laser scanning data by considering geometric and radiometric information, but without relying on trajectory data. The global strategy for segmentation involves the application of an optimized intensity threshold in order to segment the points that correspond to traffic sign panels. Next, contour recognition is performed for each sign using a linear regression model based on a raster image, which is generated for each cluster of points. The shape evaluation is motivated by the correspondence between contour shape and function of the traffic. The completeness of results for detection (92.11%) and classification (83.91%) demonstrates that this implementation is promising for the automatic detection and inventory analysis of traffic signs in road mapping applications. The efficiency rates are acceptable in urban areas, but our tests indicate that the detection and classification rates are more robust in road environments.

Predicting vegetation characteristics in a changing environment by means of laser scanning

Accurate and up-to-date information concerning vegetation characteristics is needed for decision-making from individual-tree-level management activities to the strategic planning of forest resources. Outdated information may lead to unbeneficial or even wrong decisions, at least when it comes to the timing of management activities. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) has so far been successfully used for applications involving detailed vegetation mapping because of its capability to simultaneously produce accurate information on vegetation and ground surfaces. The aim of this dissertation was to develop methods for characterizing vegetation and its changes in varying environments. A method called multisource single-tree inventory (MS-STI) was developed in substudy I to update urban tree attributes. In MSSTI stem map was produced with terrestrial laser scanning and by combining the stem map with predictors derived from ALS data it was possible to obtain improved estimates of diameter-at-breast height but also to produce new attributes such as height and crown size. Boat-based mobile laser scanning (MLS) data were employed in substudy II to map riverbank vegetation and identify changes. The overall classification accuracy of 73% was obtained, which is similar to accuracies found in other studies. With multi-temporal MLS data sets changes in vegetation were mapped year to year. In substudy III, open access ALS data were combined with multisource national forest inventory (NFI) data to investigate the drivers associated to wind damage. The special interest was in ALS-based predictors to map areas with wind disturbance and apply logistic regression to produce a continuous probability surface of wind predisposition to identify areas most likely to experience wind damage. The results demonstrated that a combination of ALS and multisource NFI in the modelling approach increased the prediction accuracy from 76% to 81%. The dissertation showed the capability of ALS and MLS for characterizing vegetation and mapping changes in varying environments. The developed applications could increase and expand the utilization of multi-temporal 3D data sets as well as increase data value. The results of this dissertation can be utilized in producing more accurate, diverse, and up-to-date information for decision-making related to natural resources.

A method based on an adaptive radius cylinder model for detecting pole-like objects in mobile laser scanning data

ABSTRACTThis letter presents a method based on an adaptive radius cylinder model (MBARCM) for detecting pole-like objects in mobile laser scanning data. First, the unorganized point clouds are voxelized to compress and organize the original data. Second, the bottom-up tracing algorithm is implemented to detect potential vertical-object locations, and the neighbour segments are merged. Finally, the adaptive radius cylinder model is built based on the selected layers of the vertical segment, and the model is applied to the merged vertical segments to perform isolation analysis. The performance of the proposed method is validated on three test sites for two datasets. Using the proposed method, the completeness values ranged from 94.6% to 97.7% for the three sites tested, while the correctness values were from 79% to 100%.

Filtering the outliers from backpack mobile laser scanning data

Backpack mobile laser scanners provide rapid data acquisition and allow access to all walkable areas. We aim to remove outliers from the data of a prototype backpack mobile laser scanning system. After removing dark intensity points, our approach mainly uses voxel grids. Firstly, we remove points that only have a few points in the neighborhood. Secondly, we search for outlier clusters with a 3D convolution of voxel grids. Thirdly, outlier clusters located in the air or below the ground are removed with a single elimination bin. As a result, the majority of outliers are successfully removed from backpack mobile laser scanning data.

Automated Detection of Urban Road Manhole Covers Using Mobile Laser Scanning Data

This paper proposes a novel framework for automated detection of urban road manhole covers using mobile laser scanning (MLS) data. First, to narrow searching regions and reduce the computational complexity, road surface points are segmented from a raw point cloud via a curb-based road surface segmentation approach and rasterized into a georeferenced intensity image through inverse distance weighted interpolation. Then, a supervised deep learning model is developed to construct a multilayer feature generation model for depicting high-order features of local image patches. Next, a random forest model is trained to learn mappings from high-order patch features to the probabilities of the existence of urban road manhole covers centered at specific locations. Finally, urban road manhole covers are detected from georeferenced intensity images based on the multilayer feature generation model and random forest model. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average completeness, correctness, quality, and $\mathrm{F}_1$ -measure of 0.955, 0.959, 0.917, and 0.957, respectively, in detecting urban road manhole covers from georeferenced intensity images. Comparative studies demonstrate the advantageous performance of the proposed algorithm over other existing methods for rapid and automated detection of urban road manhole covers using MLS data.

PARAMETERIC ANALYSIS FOR AUTOMATED EXTRACTION OF ROAD EDGES FROM MOBILE LASER SCANNING DATA

Abstract. The applicability of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems continue to prove their worth in route corridor mapping due to the rapid, continuous and cost effective 3D data acquisition capability. LiDAR data provides a number of attributes which can be useful for extracting various road features. Road edge is a fundamental feature and its accurate knowledge increases the reliability and precision of extracting other road features. We developed an automated algorithm for extracting left and right edges from MLS data. The algorithm involved several input parameters which are required to be analysed in order to find their optimal values. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the dimension parameters of input data and raster cell in our algorithm. These parameters were analysed based on temporal, completeness and accuracy performance of our algorithm for their different sets of values. This analysis provided the estimation of an optimal values of parameters which were used to automate the process of extracting road edges from MLS data.

Road Boundaries Detection Based on Local Normal Saliency From Mobile Laser Scanning Data

The accurate extraction of roads is a prerequisite for the automatic extraction of other road features. This letter describes a method for detecting road boundaries from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds in an urban environment. The key idea of our method is directly constructing a saliency map on 3-D unorganized point clouds to extract road boundaries. The method consists of four major steps, i.e., road partition with the assistance of the vehicle trajectory, salient map construction and salient points extraction, curb detection and curb lowest points extraction, and road boundaries fitting. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the point clouds of an urban scene collected by a RIEGL VMX-450 MLS system. The completeness, correctness, and quality of the extracted road boundaries are 95.41%, 99.35%, and 94.81%, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is feasible for detecting road boundaries in MLS point clouds.

Automated Extraction of Urban Road Facilities Using Mobile Laser Scanning Data

This paper proposes a novel, automated algorithm for rapidly extracting urban road facilities, including street light poles, traffic signposts, and bus stations, for transportation-related applications. A detailed description and implementation of the proposed algorithm is provided using mobile laser scanning data collected by a state-of-the-art RIEGL VMX-450 system. First, to reduce the quantity of data to be handled, a fast voxel-based upward growing method is developed to remove ground points. Then, off-ground points are clustered and segmented into individual objects via Euclidean distance clustering and voxel-based normalized cut segmentation, respectively. Finally, a 3-D object matching framework, benefiting from a locally affine-invariant geometric constraint, is developed to achieve the extraction of 3-D objects. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed algorithm attains an average completeness, correctness, quality, and F1-measure of 0.949, 0.971, 0.922, and 0.960, respectively, in extracting 3-D light poles, traffic signposts, and bus stations. Comparative studies demonstrate the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed algorithm for automated and rapid extraction of urban road facilities.

Mobile Laser Scanner data for automatic surface detection based on line arrangement

Abstract An algorithm for automatic detection of planar and quasi-planar surfaces from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) data is proposed. The method uses line clouds for efficient data reduction of point clouds from MLS. The singular geometry of the MLS data on planar surfaces is used to transform the original point cloud into a more structured line cloud, which allows the simplification of the initial data and identification of surfaces by grouping lines. From each profile in the original dataset, strings of aligned points are identified, and a line cloud is defined by the endpoints of these strings. Lines are subsequently grouped following a set of parallelism, proximity and merging rules. The algorithm was tested using an urban dataset, and validated on 27 surfaces, by assessing the correctness and completeness of the point and line grouping. Correctness was, in all the surfaces, higher than 99%, and completeness was 90% on average.

AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF ROAD SURFACE AND CURBSTONE EDGES FROM MOBILE LASER SCANNING DATA

Abstract. We present a procedure for automatic extraction of the road surface from geo-referenced mobile laser scanning data. The basic assumption of the procedure is that the road surface is smooth and limited by curbstones. Two variants of jump detection are investigated for detecting curbstone edges, one based on height differences the other one based on histograms of the height data. Region growing algorithms are proposed which use the irregular laser point cloud. Two- and four-neighbourhood growing strategies utilize the two height criteria for examining the neighborhood. Both height criteria rely on an assumption about the minimum height of a low curbstone. Road boundaries with lower or no jumps will not stop the region growing process. In contrast to this objects on the road can terminate the process. Therefore further processing such as bridging gaps between detected road boundary points and the removal of wrongly detected curbstone edges is necessary. Road boundaries are finally approximated by splines. Experiments are carried out with a ca. 2 km network of smalls streets located in the neighbourhood of University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. For accuracy assessment of the extracted road surfaces, ground truth measurements are digitized manually from the laser scanner data. For completeness and correctness of the region growing result values between 92% and 95% are achieved.

Street environment change detection from mobile laser scanning point clouds

Mobile laser scanning (MLS) has become a popular technique for road inventory, building modelling, infrastructure management, mobility assessment, etc. Meanwhile, due to the high mobility of MLS systems, it is easy to revisit interested areas. However, change detection using MLS data of street environment has seldom been studied. In this paper, an approach that combines occupancy grids and a distance-based method for change detection from MLS point clouds is proposed. Unlike conventional occupancy grids, our occupancy-based method models space based on scanning rays and local point distributions in 3D without voxelization. A local cylindrical reference frame is presented for the interpolation of occupancy between rays according to the scanning geometry. The Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) is utilized for both intra-data evidence fusion and inter-data consistency assessment. Occupancy of reference point cloud is fused at the location of target points and then the consistency is evaluated directly on the points. A point-to-triangle (PTT) distance-based method is combined to improve the occupancy-based method. Because it is robust to penetrable objects, e.g. vegetation, which cause self-conflicts when modelling occupancy. The combined method tackles irregular point density and occlusion problems, also eliminates false detections on penetrable objects.

Automatic Extraction of Railroad Centerlines from Mobile Laser Scanning Data

In this paper, we describe the automatic extraction of centerlines of railroads. Mobile Laser Scanning systems are able to capture the 3D environment of the rail tracks with a high level of detail. Our approach first detects laser points that were reflected by the rail tracks, by making use of local properties such as parallelism and height in relation to neighboring objects. In the modeling stage, we present two approaches to determine the centerline location. The first approach generates center points in a data-driven manner by projecting rail track points to the parallel track, and taking the midpoint as initial center point. Next, a piecewise linear function is fitted through the center points to generate center points at a regular interval. The second approach models the rail track by fitting piecewise 3D track models to the rail track points. The model consists of a pair of two parallel rail tracks. The fitted pieces are smoothened by a Fourier series interpolation function. After that the centerline is implicitly determined by the geometric center of the pair of tracks. Reference data has been used to analyze the quality of our results, confirming that the position of the centerlines can be determined with an accuracy of 2–3 cm.

모바일 레이저 스캐닝 데이터로부터 철도 선로 추출에 관한 연구

This study purposed on introducing a new automated solution for detecting railway tracks and reconstructing track models from the mobile laser scanning data. The proposed solution completes following procedures; the study initiated with detecting a potential railway region, called Region Of Interest (ROI), and approximating the orientation of railway track trajectory with the raw data. At next, the knowledge-based detection of railway tracks was performed for localizing track candidates in the first strip. In here, a strip -referring the local track search region- is generated in the orthogonal direction to the orientation of track trajectory. Lastly, an initial track model generated over the candidate points, which were detected by GMM-EM (Gaussian Mixture Model-Expectation & Maximization) -based clustering strip- wisely grows to capture all track points of interest and thus converted into geometric track model in the tracking by detection framework. Therefore, the proposed railway track tracking process includes following key features; it is able to reduce the complexity in detecting track points by using a hypothetical track model. Also, it enhances the efficiency of track modeling process by simultaneously capturing track points and modeling tracks that resulted in the minimization of data processing time and cost. The proposed method was developed using the C++ program language and was evaluated by the LiDAR data, which was acquired from MMS over an urban railway track area with a complex railway scene as well.

An Algorithm for Automated Estimation of Road Roughness from Mobile Laser Scanning Data

AbstractRoad roughness is the deviation of a road surface from a designed surface grade that influences safety conditions for road users. Mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems provide a rapid, continuous and cost‐effective way of collecting highly accurate and dense 3D point‐cloud data along a route corridor. In this paper an algorithm for the automated estimation of road roughness from MLS data is presented, where a surface grid is fitted to the lidar points associated with the road surface. The elevation difference between the lidar points and their surface grid equivalents provides residual values in height which can be used to estimate roughness along the road surface. Tests validated the new road‐roughness algorithm by successfully estimating surface conditions on multiple road sections. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive approach to surveying road networks.

Automated Road Information Extraction From Mobile Laser Scanning Data

This paper presents a survey of literature about road feature extraction, giving a detailed description of a Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) system (RIEGL VMX-450) for transportation-related applications. This paper describes the development of automated algorithms for extracting road features (road surfaces, road markings, and pavement cracks) from MLS point cloud data. The proposed road surface extraction algorithm detects road curbs from a set of profiles that are sliced along vehicle trajectory data. Based on segmented road surface points, we create Geo-Referenced Feature (GRF) images and develop two algorithms, respectively, for extracting the following: 1) road markings with high retroreflectivity and 2) cracks containing low contrast with their surroundings, low signal-to-noise ratio, and poor continuity. A comprehensive comparison illustrates satisfactory performance of the proposed algorithms and concludes that MLS is a reliable and cost-effective alternative for rapid road inspection.

Hierarchical extraction of urban objects from mobile laser scanning data

Point clouds collected in urban scenes contain a huge number of points (e.g., billions), numerous objects with significant size variability, complex and incomplete structures, and variable point densities, raising great challenges for the automated extraction of urban objects in the field of photogrammetry, computer vision, and robotics. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing an automated method to extract urban objects robustly and efficiently. The proposed method generates multi-scale supervoxels from 3D point clouds using the point attributes (e.g., colors, intensities) and spatial distances between points, and then segments the supervoxels rather than individual points by combining graph based segmentation with multiple cues (e.g., principal direction, colors) of the supervoxels. The proposed method defines a set of rules for merging segments into meaningful units according to types of urban objects and forms the semantic knowledge of urban objects for the classification of objects. Finally, the proposed method extracts and classifies urban objects in a hierarchical order ranked by the saliency of the segments. Experiments show that the proposed method is efficient and robust for extracting buildings, streetlamps, trees, telegraph poles, traffic signs, cars, and enclosures from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds, with an overall accuracy of 92.3%.