Automated Localization and Classification of Expressway Pole-Like Road Facilities from Mobile Laser Scanning Data

Mobile LiDAR is an emerging advanced technology for capturing three-dimensional road information at a large scale effectively and precisely. Pole-like road facilities are crucial street infrastructures as they provide valuable information for road mapping and road inventory. Thus, the automated localization and classification of road facilities are necessary. This paper proposes a voxel-based method to detect and classify pole-like objects in an expressway environment based on the spatially independent and vertical height continuity analysis. First, the ground points are eliminated, and the nonground points are merged into clusters. Second, the pole-like objects are extracted using horizontal cross section analysis and minimum vertical height criteria. Finally, a set of knowledge-based rules, which comprise height features and geometric shape, is constructed to classify the detected road poles into different types of road facilities. Two test sites of point clouds in an expressway environment, which are located in Bangkok, Thailand, are used to assess the proposed method. The proposed method extracts the pole-like road facilities from two datasets with a detection rate of 95.1% and 93.5% and an overall quality of 89.7% and 98.0% in the classification stage, respectively. This shows that the algorithm could be a promising alternative for the localization and classification of pole-like road facilities with acceptable accuracy.

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